Since the free parameter and the two auxiliary points have effect on the shape of the Cardinal spline curves, a natural idea arises to find the optimal parameter and auxiliary points to obtain the smoothest curves. We use curvature variation minimization to achieve this goal in this paper. By minimizing an appropriate approximation of the curvature variation energy, the unique solution can be easily obtained. Some examples show that the Cardinal spline curves with minimum curvature variation are better than the Catmull-Rom spline curves in dealing with interpolation problems
