Deconvolution using thin-plate splines

Abstract

The ubiquitous problem of estimating 2-dimensional profile information from a set of line integrated measurements is tackled with Bayesian probability theory by exploiting prior information about local smoothness. For this purpose thin-plate-splines (the 2-D minimal curvature analogue of cubic-splines in 1-D) are employed. The optimal number of support points required for inversion of 2-D tomographic problems is determined using model comparison. Properties of this approach are discussed and the question of suitable priors is addressed. Finally, we illustrated the properties of this approach with 2-D inversion results using data from line-integrated measurements from fusion experiments.