A mixed finite element discretisation of thin plate splines based on biorthogonal systems (Q293088)

The paper is focused on the smoothing procedures based on thin plate spline. A discretization technique for the minimization of the penalty functional is proposed. The authors introduce additional unknowns, the gradient of the smoothing function and the Lagrange multiplier. The problem is defined using mixed finite elements, thus being reduced to a sparse system with the size depending linearly on the number of finite element nodes. The pair of bases for the gradient and the Lagrange multiplier forms a biorthogonal system, the scheme being numerically efficient. The method based on pre-conditioned conjugate gradient constitutes an efficient solver for the linear system related to the finite element discretization. Numerical experiments are conducted in order to show the performance of the proposed method.