Cubic Spline Prewavelets on the Four-Directional Mesh

Dedicated to Professor M. J. D. Powell on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday and his retirement. In this paper, we design differentiable, two-dimensional, piecewise polynomial cubic prewavelets of particularly small compact support. They are given in closed form, and provide stable, orthogonal decompositions of L ² (R ² ) . In particular, the splines we use in our prewavelet constructions give rise to stable bases of spline spaces that contain all cubic polynomials, whereas the more familiar box spline constructions cannot reproduce all cubic polynomials, unless resorting to a box spline of higher polynomial degree.