Characterization of local sampling sequences for spline subspaces

The sampling theorem is one of the most powerful tools in signal analysis. It says that to recover a function in certain function spaces, it suffices to know the values of the function on a sequence of points. Most of known results, e.g., regular and irregular sampling theorems for band-limited functions, concern global sampling. That is, to recover a function at a point or on an interval, we have to know all the samples which are usually infinitely many. On the other hand, local sampling, which invokes only finite samples to reconstruct a function on a bounded interval, is practically useful since we need only to consider a function on a bounded interval in many cases and computers can process only finite samples. In this paper, we give a characterization of local sampling sequences for spline subspaces, which is equivalent to the celebrated Schönberg-Whitney Theorem and is easy to verify. As applications, we give several local sampling theorems on spline subspaces, which generalize and improve some known results.