3 research outputs found
The implicit equation of a canal surface
A canal surface is an envelope of a one parameter family of spheres. In this
paper we present an efficient algorithm for computing the implicit equation of
a canal surface generated by a rational family of spheres. By using Laguerre
and Lie geometries, we relate the equation of the canal surface to the equation
of a dual variety of a certain curve in 5-dimensional projective space. We
define the \mu-basis for arbitrary dimension and give a simple algorithm for
its computation. This is then applied to the dual variety, which allows us to
deduce the implicit equations of the the dual variety, the canal surface and
any offset to the canal surface.Comment: 26 pages, to be published in Journal of Symbolic Computatio