Computation of the minimum distance between two Bézier curves/surfaces

We present an efficient and robust method based on the culling approach for computing the minimum distance between two Bézier curves or Bézier surfaces. Our contribution is a novel dynamic subdivision scheme that enables our method to converge faster than previous methods based on binary subdivision.

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► Our algorithm computes the minimum distance between two Bézier curves/surfaces.
► For curve case, our algorithm is faster than the existing algorithms by about 21–93%.
► For surface case, our algorithm is faster than the binary subdivision by about 18–73%.