Numerical approximation by discrete interpolating variational splines

An approximation problem of parametric curves and surfaces is studied by a new kind of spline functions from some Lagrange or Hermite data set. We present an interpolation problem by minimizing a functional on a parametric finite element space in order to obtain the new notion of a spline. We call it discrete interpolating variational spline. We show how to compute in practice such spline and we carefully prove a convergence result. To illustrate the generality and practice of this work we give some particular cases and we finish by presenting some numerical and graphical examples.