Bases of T-meshes and the refinement of hierarchical B-splines

In this paper we consider spaces of bivariate splines of bi-degree (m,n) with maximal order of smoothness over domains associated to a two-dimensional grid. We define admissible classes of domains for which suitable combinatorial technique allows us to obtain the dimension of such spline spaces and the number of tensor-product B-splines acting effectively on these domains. Following the strategy introduced recently by Giannelli and Jüttler, these results enable us to prove that under certain assumptions about the configuration of a hierarchical T-mesh the hierarchical B-splines form a basis of bivariate splines of bi-degree (m,n) with maximal order of smoothness over this hierarchical T-mesh. In addition, we derive a sufficient condition about the configuration of a hierarchical T-mesh that ensures a weighted partition of unity property for hierarchical B-splines with only positive weights.