The effects of spline interpolation on power spectral density

This paper discusses the power spectral effects of spline interpolators. A general technique is given for finding the steady-state spectral effects of splines of all orders, when applied following uniform sampling of the input function. The following observations are made: 1) the even order splines that were examined (second and fourth order) possessed divergent steady-state frequency transfer functions, 2) the degree of preservation of the power spectral density of the input process increased with the order of the (odd order) spline used for interpolation, and 3) the reconstruction of a stationary random process over a finite record length will, on the average, have less power than indicated by the steady-state transfer function.