Empirical Research of Interpolation Methods in Distortion Modeling for the Coordinate Transformation between Local and Global Geodetic Datums

Conformal coordinate transformations very often are not accurate enough to be used for the coordinate transformations between local and global geodetic datums because of the inhomogeneity of the spatial data in different geodetic datums. Therefore, distortion modeling is used to improve the accuracy of the coordinate transformations. This paper presents empirical research on distortion modeling methods used to improve the coordinate transformation process from local to global geodetic datum and vice versa. Various models of distortion shifts in different grid resolutions were computed, evaluated, and compared with the official Croatian model of distortion shifts. Tested modeling methods are inverse distance to a power, kriging, minimum curvature, modified Shepard's method, natural neighbor, nearest neighbor, polynomial regression, radial basis function, triangulation with linear interpolation, moving average, local polynomial, and least-squares collocation. Distortion model performance was evaluated using summary statistics derived from the back-interpolation for the independent control spatial data set. The present paper proposes the most appropriate method(s) of distortion modeling for the Croatian case and gives brief instructions on possible coordinate transformation improvements of the official Croatian coordinate transformation.