Abstract: In this paper we propose a sparse modeling based optimization method to formulate the curve fairness problem. Based on an overall review on previous fairness criteria and our comprehensive working experience on ship design, our proposed fairness criteria not only covers all the previous cases but also considers cases which are never studied before. The curve fairness problem is further formulated as a sparse modeling based optimization problem according to our proposed criteria. An effective and efficient iterative refinement algorithm is proposed. Numerous experimental results demonstrate the practicability and effectiveness of our fairing algorithm, and the comparisons show that our fairing algorithm outperforms the state of the art curve fairness methods.