I have worked on triangle mesh for a while. The mesh is reconstructed from range images captured via one 3D scanner. Currently I am very interested in using parametric surfaces to represent one mesh. It says from one book that Parametric surfaces are defined by a vector-valued parameterization function that maps a 2D parameter domain to the surface. However, the parameter domain is always written as (u, v) instead of (x,y). In my view, parameter domain(x,y) is very straightforward.
In computer-aided geometric design where NURBS surface is popularly employed, the NURBS surface is represented by parameter domain (u,v), is it difficult to find the parameter domain(u,v) from cartesian coordinates of points?