Scattered surface data estimation and visualization
In the thesis, two new interpolation methods, i.e., extended piecewise Hardy's method and Bezier triangle method, are developed for scattered surface data and the biquadratic method is developed for regular data set. A new contour method which can generate arbitrarily smooth contour line is also presented. The new methods are compared with the existing ones with real scattered data set, supplied by the DOE (Department of Energy), via DRI (Desert Research Institute) and computer simulated data. The results show that the extended piecewise Hardy's method is the most accurate method among all the methods compared, and it is much faster than the original Hardy's method. The speedup is approximately of the order {dollar}O(n\sp2){dollar}. The biquadratic method is approximately three times faster than the bicubic splines, and both generate comparable result for the tested data; A graphics package for scattered data interpolation and visualization with the above methods is implemented on Sun SPARC station under UNIX running X windows as well as IBMPC under the MSDOS. The package is written in C.
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