Optimal Spline Approximation via l0-Minimization

Splines are part of the standard toolbox for the approximation of functions and curves in R-d. Still, the problem of finding the spline that best approximates an input function or curve is ill-posed, since in general this yields a "spline" with an infinite number of segments. The problem can be regularized by adding a penalty term for the number of spline segments. We show how this idea can be formulated as an l(0)-regularized quadratic problem. This gives us a notion of optimal approximating splines that depend on one parameter, which weights the approximation error against the number of segments. We detail this concept for different types of splines including B-splines and composite Bezier curves. Based on the latest development in the field of sparse approximation, we devise a solver for the resulting minimization problems and show applications to spline approximation of planar and space curves and to spline conversion of motion capture data.