Spherical designs for function approximation and beyond

Abstract In this paper, we compare two optimization algorithms using full Hessian and approximation Hessian to obtain numerical spherical designs through their variational characterization. Based on the obtained spherical design point sets, we investigate the approximation of smooth and non-smooth functions by spherical harmonics with spherical designs. Finally, we use spherical framelets for denoising Wendland functions as an application, which shows the great potential of spherical designs in spherical data processing.