Thin plate splines (TPS) are a spline-based technique for data interpolation and smoothing. "A spline is a function defined by polynomials in a piecewise manner." They were introduced to geometric design by Duchon. They are an important special case of a polyharmonic spline. Robust Point Matching (RPM) is a common extension and shortly known as the TPS-RPM algorithm.
The name thin plate spline refers to a physical analogy involving the... meer