  Analysis on the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^{2}$ found many applications in
seismology, weather prediction, astrophysics, signal analysis, crystallography,
computer vision, computerized tomography, neuroscience, and statistics.
  In the last two decades, the importance of these and other applications
triggered the development of various tools such as splines and wavelet bases
suitable for the unit spheres $\mathbb{S}^{2}$, $\>\>\mathbb{S}^{3}$ and the
rotation group $SO(3)$. Present paper is a summary of some of results of the
author and his collaborators on generalized (average) variational splines and
localized frames (wavelets) on compact Riemannian manifolds. The results are
illustrated by applications to Radon-type transforms on $\mathbb{S}^{d}$ and
$SO(3)$.
