Sufficient condition for injectivity of NURBS volumes by tangent cones

NURBS method is the standard mathematical method for describing the shapes of curves/surfaces/volumes, and it is extensively used in computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing, and computer graphics. The injectivity of NURBS volumes means that they do not have self-intersections. Since the injectivity of parameterizations depend on the signs of their Jacobian functions, and the Jacobian of a NURBS volume is determined by the determinant of its tangent vectors in three directions, we first propose a method to compute the bounding vectors of the tangent cones of NURBS volume in this paper. Then the sufficient condition for the injectivity of NURBS volume is proposed. A checking algorithm is also presented. Some examples are given to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.