Polyharmonic splines generated by multivariate smooth interpolation

Abstract

Polyharmonic splines of order m satisfy the polyharmonic equation of order m in n variables. Moreover, if employed as basis functions for interpolation they are radial functions. We are concerned with the problem of construction of the smooth interpolation formula presented as the minimizer of suitable functionals subject to interpolation constraints for n≥1. This is the principal motivation of the paper.We show a particular procedure for determining the interpolation formula that in a natural way leads to a linear combination of polyharmonic splines of a fixed order, possibly complemented with lower order polynomial terms. If it is advantageous for the interpolant in the problem solved to be a polyharmonic spline we can construct such an interpolant directly using the multivariate smooth approximation technique. The smoothness of the spline can be a priori chosen. Smooth interpolation can be very useful e.g. in signal processing, computer aided geometric design or construction of geographic information systems. A 1D computational example is presented.