Hybrid Sparse Resultant Matrices for Bivariate Polynomials

We study systems of three bivariate polynomials whose Newton polygons are scaled copies of a single polygon. Our main contribution is to construct square resultant matrices, which are submatrices of those introduced by Cattani et al. (1998), and whose determinants are nontrivial multiples of the sparse (or toric) resultant. The matrix is hybrid in that it contains a submatrix of Sylvester type and an additional row expressing the toric Jacobian. If we restrict our attention to matrices of (almost) Sylvester-type and systems as specified above, then the algorithm yields the smallest possible matrix in general. This is achieved by strongly exploiting the combinatorics of sparse elimination, namely by a new piecewise-linear lifting. The major motivation comes from systems encountered in geometric modeling. Our preliminary Maple implementation, applied to certain examples, illustrates our construction and compares it with alternative matrices. c © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.