Bézier surface is one of the most commonly used modeling tools in CAD/CAM systems. During the development of a system

the research of approximate merging algorithms for a pair of adjacent ézier surfaces is of great importance. Approximate merging of two adjacent Bézier surfaces is that two adjacent Bézier surfaces of degreem×nis approximated by one of degreek×l(k≥m

l≥n) within the admissible error bound. As exchanging information becomes more and more important in product design

the international network is more and more developed

and more and more enterprises have been vastly established

the exchanging of product model data is becoming far more frequent than ever. Before the exchanging of product model data

if approximate merging algorithms are used

then geometric data can be reduced. In this paper

an approximate merging method for tensor product Bézier surfaces is presented by using the matrix representation of subdivided Bézier surface and by minimizing the distance function defined between the original Bézier surfaces and the merged Bézier surface. The explicit representation for control points of the merged surface is obtained. Higher order of continuity along the boundaries of surfaces is considered in the merging process. The approximate merging for a pair of adjacent Bézier surfaces can be directly carried out by using the method of this paper.