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On the representation of Dupin cyclides in Lie sphere geometry with applications. (English) Zbl 1187.68643

Summary: Dupin cyclides are canal surfaces defined as envelopes of a family of oriented spheres which touch three given oriented spheres. With respect to their attractive geometric properties they are often used in Computer Aided Geometric Design and in many engineering applications. In this paper, we study these surfaces from the point of view of Lie sphere geometry. This representation enables to solve many complicated problems through simple and well known methods of linear algebra. As for applications, we present an algorithm for computing their rational parametrizations and demonstrate a construction of blends between two canal surfaces using methods of Lie geometry.

MSC:

68U05 Computer graphics; computational geometry (digital and algorithmic aspects)
51N25 Analytic geometry with other transformation groups