The uniform convergence of thin plate spline interpolation in two dimensions

Summary. Let be a function from to that has square integrable second derivatives and let be the thin plate spline interpolant to at the points in . We seek bounds on the error when is in the convex hull of the interpolation points or when is close to at least one of the interpolation points but need not be in the convex hull. We find, for example, that, if is inside a triangle whose vertices are any three of the interpolation points, then is bounded above by a multiple of , where is the length of the longest side of the triangle and where the multiplier is independent of the interpolation points. Further, if is any bounded set in that is not a subset of a single straight line, then we prove that a sequence of thin plate spline interpolants converges to uniformly on . Specifically, we require , where is now the least upper bound on the numbers and where , , is the least Euclidean distance from to an interpolation point. Our method of analysis applies integration by parts and the Cauchy--Schwarz inequality to the scalar product between second derivatives that occurs in the variational calculation of thin plate spline interpolation. Received November 10, 1993 / Revised version received March 1994