Fastest way to calculate cubic bezier curves? - c++

Question

Right now I calculate it like this:
double dx1 = a.RightHandle.x - a.UserPoint.x;
double dy1 = a.RightHandle.y - a.UserPoint.y;
double dx2 = b.LeftHandle.x - a.RightHandle.x;
double dy2 = b.LeftHandle.y - a.RightHandle.y;
double dx3 = b.UserPoint.x - b.LeftHandle.x;
double dy3 = b.UserPoint.y - b.LeftHandle.y;
float len = sqrt(dx1 * dx1 + dy1 * dy1) +
sqrt(dx2 * dx2 + dy2 * dy2) +
sqrt(dx3 * dx3 + dy3 * dy3);
int NUM_STEPS = int(len * 0.05);
if(NUM_STEPS > 55)
{
NUM_STEPS = 55;
}
double subdiv_step = 1.0 / (NUM_STEPS + 1);
double subdiv_step2 = subdiv_step*subdiv_step;
double subdiv_step3 = subdiv_step*subdiv_step*subdiv_step;
double pre1 = 3.0 * subdiv_step;
double pre2 = 3.0 * subdiv_step2;
double pre4 = 6.0 * subdiv_step2;
double pre5 = 6.0 * subdiv_step3;
double tmp1x = a.UserPoint.x - a.RightHandle.x * 2.0 + b.LeftHandle.x;
double tmp1y = a.UserPoint.y - a.RightHandle.y * 2.0 + b.LeftHandle.y;
double tmp2x = (a.RightHandle.x - b.LeftHandle.x)*3.0 - a.UserPoint.x + b.UserPoint.x;
double tmp2y = (a.RightHandle.y - b.LeftHandle.y)*3.0 - a.UserPoint.y + b.UserPoint.y;
double fx = a.UserPoint.x;
double fy = a.UserPoint.y;
//a user
//a right
//b left
//b user
double dfx = (a.RightHandle.x - a.UserPoint.x)*pre1 + tmp1x*pre2 + tmp2x*subdiv_step3;
double dfy = (a.RightHandle.y - a.UserPoint.y)*pre1 + tmp1y*pre2 + tmp2y*subdiv_step3;
double ddfx = tmp1x*pre4 + tmp2x*pre5;
double ddfy = tmp1y*pre4 + tmp2y*pre5;
double dddfx = tmp2x*pre5;
double dddfy = tmp2y*pre5;
int step = NUM_STEPS;
while(step--)
{
fx += dfx;
fy += dfy;
dfx += ddfx;
dfy += ddfy;
ddfx += dddfx;
ddfy += dddfy;
temp[0] = fx;
temp[1] = fy;
Contour[currentcontour].DrawingPoints.push_back(temp);
}
temp[0] = (GLdouble)b.UserPoint.x;
temp[1] = (GLdouble)b.UserPoint.y;
Contour[currentcontour].DrawingPoints.push_back(temp);
I'm wondering if there is a faster way to interpolate cubic beziers?
Thanks

Answer 1

Look into forward differencing for a faster method. Care must be taken to deal with rounding errors.
The adaptive subdivision method, with some checks, can be fast and accurate.

Answer 2

There is another point that is also very important, which is that you are approximating your curve using a lot of fixed-length straight-line segments. This is inefficient in areas where your curve is nearly straight, and can lead to a nasty angular poly-line where the curve is very curvy. There is not a simple compromise that will work for high and low curvatures.
To get around this is you can dynamically subdivide the curve (e.g. split it into two pieces at the half-way point and then see if the two line segments are within a reasonable distance of the curve. If a segment is a good fit for the curve, stop there; if it is not, then subdivide it in the same way and repeat). You have to be careful to subdivide it enough that you don't miss any localised (small) features when sampling the curve in this way.
This will not always draw your curve "faster", but it will guarantee that it always looks good while using the minimum number of line segments necessary to achieve that quality.
Once you are drawing the curve "well", you can then look at how to make the necessary calculations "faster".

Answer 3

Actually you should continue splitting until the two lines joining points on curve (end nodes) and their farthest control points are "flat enough":
- either fully aligned or
- their intersection is at a position whose "square distance" from both end nodes is below one half "square pixel") - note that you don't need to compute the actual distance, as it would require computing a square root, which is slow)
When you reach this situation, ignore the control points and join the two end-points with a straight segment.
This is faster, because rapidly you'll get straight segments that can be drawn directly as if they were straight lines, using the classic Bresenham algorithm.
Note: you should take into account the fractional bits of the endpoints to properly set the initial value of the error variable accumulating differences and used by the incremental Bresenham algorithm, in order to get better results (notably when the final segment to draw is very near from the horizontal or vertical or from the two diagonals); otherwise you'll get visible artefacts.
The classic Bresenham algorithm to draw lines between points that are aligned on an integer grid initializes this error variable to zero for the position of the first end node. But a minor modification of the Bresenham algorithm scales up the two distances variables and the error value simply by a constant power of two, before using the 0/+1 increments for the x or y variable which remain unscaled.
The high order bits of the error variable also allows you compute an alpha value that can be used to draw two stacked pixels with the correct alpha-shading. In most cases, your images will be using 8-bit color planes at most, so you will not need more that 8 bits of extra precision for the error value, and the upscaling can be limited to the factor of 256: you can use it to draw "smooth" lines.
But you could limit yourself to the scaling factor of 16 (four bits): typical bitmap images you have to draw are not extremely wide and their resolution is far below +/- 2 billions (the limit of a signed 32-bit integer): when you scale up the coordinates by a factor of 16, it will remain 28 bits to work with, but you should already have "clipped" the geometry to the view area of your bitmap to render, and the error variable of the Bresenham algorithm will remain below 56 bits in all cases and will still fit in a 64-bit integer.
If your error variable is 32-bit, you must limit the scaled coordinates below 2^15 (not more than 15 bits) for the worst case (otherwise the test of the sign of the error varaible used by Bresenham will not work due to integer overflow in the worst case), and with the upscaling factor of 16 (4 bits) you'll be limited to draw images not larger than 11 bits in width or height, i.e. 2048x2048 images.
But if your draw area is effectively below 2048x2048 pixels, there's no problem to draw lined smoothed by 16 alpha-shaded values of the draw color (to draw alpha-shaded pixels, you need to read the orignal pixel value in the image before mixing the alpha-shaded color, unless the computed shade is 0% for the first staked pixel that you don't need to draw, and 100% for the second stacked pixel that you can overwrite directly with the plain draw color)
If your computed image also includes an alpha-channel, your draw color can also have its own alpha value that you'll need to shade and combine with the alpha value of the pixels to draw. But you don't need any intermediate buffer just for the line to draw because you can draw directly in the target buffer.
With the error variable used by the Bresenham algorithm, there's no problem at all caused by rounding errors because they are taken into account by this variable. So set its initial value properly (the alternative, by simply scaling up all coordinates by a factor of 16 before starting subdividing recursively the spline is 16 times slower in the Bresenham algorithm itself).

Answer 4

Note how "flat enough" can be calculated. "Flatness" is a mesure of the minimum absolute angle (between 0 and 180°) between two sucessive segment but you don't need to compute the actual angle because this flatness is also equivalent to setting a minimum value to the cosine of their relative angle.
That cosine value also does not need to be computed directly because all you need is in fact the vector product of the two vectors and compare it with the square of the maximum of their length.
Note also that the "square of the cosine" is also "one minus the square of the sine". A maximum square cosine value is also a minimum square sine value... Now you know which kind of "vector product" to use: the fastest and simplest to compute is the scalar product, whose square is proportional to the square sine of the two vectors and to the product of square lengths of both vectors.
So checking if the curve is "flat enough" is simple: compute a ratio between two scalar products and see if this ratio is below the "flatness" constant value (of the minimum square sine). There's no division by zero because you'll determine which of the two vectors is the longest, and if this one has a square length below 1/4, your curve is already flat enough for the rendering resolution; otherwise check this ratio between the longest and the shortest vector (formed by the crossing diagonals of the convex hull containing the end points and control points):
with quadratic beziers, the convex hull is a triangle and you choose two pairs
with cubic beziers, the convex hull is a 4-sides convex polygon and the diagonals may either join an end point with one of the two control points, or join together the two end-points and the two control points and you have six possibilities
Use the combination giving the maximum length for the first vector between the 1st end-point and one of the three other points, the second vector joining two other points):
Al you need is to determine the "minimum square length" of the segments starting with one end-point or control-point to the next control-point or end-point in the sequence. (in a quadratic Bezier you just compare two segments, with a quadratic Bezier, you check 3 segments)
If this "minimum square length" is below 1/4 you can stop there, the curve is "flat enough".
Then determine the "maximum square length" of the segments starting with one end-point to any one of the other end-point or control-point (with a quadratic Bezier you can safely use the same 2 segments as above, with a cubic Bezier you discard one of the 3 segments used above joining the 2 control-points, but you add the segment joining the two end-nodes).
Then check that the "minimum square length" is lower than the product of the constant "flatness" (minimum square sine) times the "maximum square length" (if so the curve is "flat enough".
In both cases, when your curve is "flat enough", you just need to draw the segment joining the two end-points. Otherwise you split the spline recursively.
You may include a limit to the recursion, but in practice it will never be reached unless the convex hull of the curve covers a very large area in a very large draw area; even with 32 levels of recusions, it will never explode in a rectangular draw area whose diagonal is shorter than 2^32 pixels (the limit would be reached only if you are splitting a "virtual Bezier" in a virtually infinite space with floating-point coordinates but you don't intend to draw it directly, because you won't have the 1/2 pixel limitation in such space, and only if you have set an extreme value for the "flatness" such that your "minimum square sine" constant parameter is 1/2^32 or lower).