Find out if point is part of curve (spline, splipy) - geometry

Question

I have some coordinates of a 3D point curve through which I lay a spline like so:
from splipy import curve_factory
pts = [...] #3D coordinate points
curve = curve_factory.curve(pts)
I know that I can get a point in 3D along the curve by evaluating it after a certain length:
point_on_curve = curve.evaluate(t)
print(point_on_curve) #outputs coordinates: (x y z)
Is it however somehow possible to do it the other way round? Is there a function/method that can tell me if a certain point is part of the curve? Or if its almost part of the curve? Something like:
curve.func(point) #output: True
or
curve.func(point) #output: distance to curve 0.0001 --> also part of curve
Thanks!

Answer 1

I've found this script by ventusff that performs an optimization to find the value of the parameter that you call t (in the script is u) which gives the point on the spline closest to the external point.
I report below the code with some changes to make it clearer for you. I've defined a tolerance equal to 0.001.
The selection of the optimization solver and of its parameter values requires a little bit of study. I do not have enough time now for doing that, but you can try to experiment a little bit.
In this case SciPy is used for spline generation and evaluation, but you can easily replace it with splipy. The optimization is the interesting part performed using SciPy.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from scipy.interpolate import splprep, splev
from scipy.spatial.distance import euclidean
from scipy.optimize import fmin_bfgs
points_count = 40
phi = np.linspace(0, 2. * np.pi, points_count)
k = np.linspace(0, 2, points_count)
r = 0.5 + np.cos(phi)
x, y, z = r * np.cos(phi), r * np.sin(phi), k
tck, u = splprep([x, y, z], s=1)
points = splev(u, tck)
idx = np.random.randint(low=0, high=40)
noise = np.random.normal(scale=0.01)
external_point = np.array([points[0][idx], points[1][idx], points[2][idx]]) + noise
def distance_to_point(u_):
s = splev(u_, tck)
return euclidean(external_point, [s[0][0], s[1][0], s[2][0]])
closest_u = fmin_bfgs(distance_to_point, x0=np.array([0.0]), gtol=1e-8)
closest_point = splev(closest_u, tck)
tol = 1e-3
if euclidean(external_point, [closest_point[0][0], closest_point[1][0], closest_point[2][0]]) < tol:
print("The point is very close to the spline.")
ax = plt.figure().add_subplot(projection='3d')
ax.plot(points[0], points[1], points[2], "r-", label="Spline")
ax.plot(external_point[0], external_point[1], external_point[2], "bo", label="External Point")
ax.plot(closest_point[0], closest_point[1], closest_point[2], "go", label="Closest Point")
plt.legend()
plt.show()
The script draws the plot below:
and prints the following output:
Current function value: 0.000941
Iterations: 5
Function evaluations: 75
Gradient evaluations: 32
The point is very close to the spline.