Ball-morph: definition, implementation, and comparative evaluation

We define b-compatibility for planar curves and propose three ball morphing techniques between pairs of b-compatible curves. Ball-morphs use the automatic ball-map correspondence, proposed by Chazal et al., from which we derive different vertex trajectories (linear, circular, and parabolic). All three morphs are symmetric, meeting both curves with the same angle, which is a right angle for the circular and parabolic. We provide simple constructions for these ball-morphs and compare them to each other and other simple morphs (linear-interpolation, closest-projection, curvature-interpolation, Laplace-blending, and heat-propagation) using six cost measures (travel-distance, distortion, stretch, local acceleration, average squared mean curvature, and maximum squared mean curvature). The results depend heavily on the input curves. Nevertheless, we found that the linear ball-morph has consistently the shortest travel-distance and the circular ball-morph has the least amount of distortion.