Abstract: This paper presents an efficient as-rigid-as-possible(ARAP) deformation method for planar shape deformation.First,an explicit formula for computing the rotation matrices used in the deformation is introduced,which is more efficient than the previous method based on singular value decomposition(SVD) computation.Second,a local subdivision scheme is proposed to adaptively refine the triangles in regions with large distortions.It can largely reduce distortion in these regions and generate high quality deformation results.Experimental results have shown that the improved deformation method has obtained a good trade-off between deformation quality and computation efficiency.