Fairing of discrete planar curves by discrete Euler's elasticae

Abstract

After characterizing the integrable discrete analogue of the Euler's elastica, we focus our attention on the problem of approximating a given discrete planar curve by an appropriate discrete Euler's elastica. We carry out the fairing process via a $L^2\!$-distance minimization to avoid the numerical instabilities. The optimization problem is solved via a gradient-driven optimization method (IPOPT). This problem is non-convex and the result strongly depends on the initial guess, so that we use a discrete analogue of the algorithm provided by Brander et al., which gives an initial guess to the optimization method.