Publisher's Synopsis
There is a great deal of current interest in mathematical methods for representing and manipulating complicated curves and surfaces in a digital computer environment. This edited work is a collection of both short survey papers and long research papers, addressing a number of topics important to development in the field. Among these are 3-D reconstruction, thin plate splines, geometric continuity, image compression, and radial functions. The survey papers focus on several particularly active subareas of approximation theory, including tomography, wavelets, constrained approximation, multivariate splines, approximation of images, and surface compression.