Cubic Hermite spline

In the mathematical subfield of numerical analysis a cubic Hermite spline, named in honor of Charles Hermite (pronounced air MEET), is a third-degree spline with each polynomial of the spline in Hermite form. The Hermite form consists of two control points and two control tangents on each for each polynomial.

On each subinterval, given a starting point p₀ and an ending point p₁ with starting tangent m₀ and ending tangent m₁, the polynomial can be defined by

where t ∈ [0, 1].

The four Hermite basis functions can be defined as

to give the polynomial as

Since each subinterval must share tangents with neighboring subintervals, many techniques exist to determine values for shared tangents.

Some of the techniques for creating cubic Hermite splines include:

• Cardinal spline
• Catmull-Rom spline
• Kochanek-Bartels spline