Dimension of polynomial splines of mixed smoothness on T-meshes

Abstract: In this paper we study the dimension of splines of mixed smoothness on axis-aligned T-meshes. This is the setting when different orders of smoothness are required across the edges of the mesh. Given a spline space whose dimension is independent of its T-mesh's geometric embedding, we present constructive and sufficient conditions that ensure that the smoothness across a subset of the mesh edges can be reduced while maintaining stability of the dimension. The conditions have a simple geometric interpretation. Examples are presented to show the applicability of the results on both hierarchical and non-hierarchical T-meshes. For hierarchal T-meshes it is shown that mixed smoothness spline spaces that contain the space of PHT-splines (Deng et al., 2008) always have stable dimension.