TOTAL LEAST SQUARES FITTING WITH QUADRICS

A computational algorithm is developed for fitting given data in the plane or in 3-space by implicitly defined quadrics. Implicity implies that the type of the quadric is part of the model and need not be known in advance. Starting with some estimate for the coefficients of the quadric the method will alternatively determine the shortest distances from the given points onto the quadric and adapt the coefficients such as to reduce the sum of those squared distances. Numerical examples are given.