Splines on manifolds: A survey

Splines in the manifold setting have been defined as extensions from the standard Euclidean setting, but they are far more complicated. Alternative approaches, which are equivalent in the Euclidean case, lead to different results in the manifold case; the existence conditions are often quite restrictive; and the necessary computations are rather involved. All difficulties stem from the peculiar nature of the geodesic distance: in general, shortest geodesics may be not unique and the dependence on their endpoints may not be smooth; and distances cannot be computed in closed form. The former issue may impose strong limitations on the placement of control points. While the latter may greatly complicate the computations. Nevertheless, some recent results suggest that splines on surfaces may have practical impact on CAGD applications. We review the literature on this topic, accounting for both theoretical results and practical implementations.