text: Chains are vector-valued signals sampling a curve. They are important to motion signal processing and to many scientific applications including location sensors. We propose a novel measure of smoothness for chains curves by generalizing the scalar-valued concept of monotonicity. Monotonicity can be defined by the connectedness of the inverse image of balls. This definition is coordinate-invariant and can be computed efficiently over chains. Monotone curves can be discontinuous, but continuous monotone curves are differentiable a.e. Over chains, a simple sphere-preserving filter shown to never decrease the degree of monotonicity. It outperforms moving average filters over a synthetic data set. Applications include Time Series Segmentation, chain reconstruction from unordered data points, Optical Character Recognition, and Pattern Matching.
  @cite_6: We present a new approach to the problem of matching 3-D curves. The approach has a low algorithmic complexity in the number of models, and can operate in the presence of noise and partial occlusions. Our method builds upon the seminal work of (1990), where curves are first smoothed using B-splines, with matching based on hashing using curvature and torsion measures. However, we introduce two enhancements: - We make use of nonuniform B-spline approximations, which permits us to better retain information at high-curvature locations. The spline approximations are controlled (i.e., regularized) by making use of normal vectors to the surface in 3-D on which the curves lie, and by an explicit minimization of a bending energy
summary: One approach to chain smoothing is to use B-splines and Bezier curves with the @math norm @cite_6 . Correspondingly, we could measure the smoothness'' of a chain by measuring how closely one can fit it to a smooth curve. Our approach differs in that we do not use polygonal approximations or curve fitting: we consider chains to be first-class citizens.