How can I fit a smooth curve to an arbitrary shape?

I'm trying to simulate an airplane trajectory in 2D space and I need to smooth out some jagged corners that appear when I connect waypoints using ginput. The regular curve fitting tools don't seem to work since I'm not working with a one to one function. The x and y coordinates are parameterized with respect to time.

Is there any way that I can use matlab to automatically fit a smooth curve to the entire trajectory and return the coordinates of the new smoothed trajectory?

Any advice on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

One approach to try would be to use a sliding window and replace each point by the centroid of the point and its nearest neighbours. Probably better, though, would be to weight by the distance to the other points -- for example if you do have a sharp corner at a distance from other points, you don't want it moved drastically.

Another approach would be to take the outline and smooth that. And I would suspect that some kind of erosion would work as well.

Another approach to consider is using a "snap to grid" processing of the ginput() values. Or see snapping afterwards, here