Surface intersection using affine arithmetic

We describe a variant of a domain decomposition method proposed by Gleicher and Kass for intersecting and trimming parametric surfaces. Instead of using interval arithmetic to guide the decomposition, the variant described here uses affine arithmetic, a tool recently proposed for range analysis. Affine arithmetic is similar to standard interval arithmetic, but takes into account correlations between operands and sub-formulas, generally providing much tighter bounds for the computed quantities. As a consequence, the quadtree domain decompositions are much smaller and the intersection algorithm runs faster