Finite element surface fitting for bridge management

We propose a new finite element surface fitting method which can handle very large databases. This method uses finite element discretization to find an approximation of a smooth function which minimizes a sum of data residuals and second derivatives under some constraints on data. The finite element discretization derives a large scale constrained quadratic program, which can be reformulated as a system of piecewise linear equations. We develop a preconditioned Newton method to solve the system efficiently. We apply this method to form surfaces over Aomori Region in Japan by geographic databases, such that every bridge became associated with environmental information.