Implicit matrix representations of rational Bézier curves and surfaces

•Introduction of matrix representations of Bézier curves and surfaces.•Algebraic properties of matrix representations are presented.•Solving of the inversion problem by means of matrix representations.•Numerical behavior of matrix representations through singular value decomposition.•Ray-tracing of Bézier surfaces by means of matrix representations.

We introduce and study a new implicit representation of rational Bézier curves and surfaces in the 3-dimensional space. Given such a curve or surface, this representation consists of a matrix whose entries depend on the space variables and whose rank drops exactly on this curve or surface. Our approach can be seen as an extension of the moving lines implicitization method introduced by Sederberg, from non-singular matrices to the more general context of singular matrices. In the first part of this paper, we describe the construction of these new implicit matrix representations and their main geometric properties, in particular their ability to solve efficiently the inversion problem. The second part of this paper aims to show that these implicitization matrices adapt geometric problems, such as intersection problems, to the powerful tools of numerical linear algebra, in particular to one of the most important: the singular value decomposition. So, from the singular values of a given implicit matrix representation, we introduce a real evaluation function. We show that the variation of this function is qualitatively comparable to the Euclidean distance function. As an interesting consequence, we obtain a new determinantal formula for implicitizing a rational space curve or surface over the field of real numbers. Then, we show that implicit matrix representations can be used with numerical computations, in particular there is no need for symbolic computations to use them. We give some rigorous results explaining the numerical stability that we have observed in our experiments. We end the paper with a short illustration on ray tracing of parameterized surfaces.