  This paper deals with the resolution of inverse problems in a periodic
setting or, in other terms, the reconstruction of periodic continuous-domain
signals from their noisy measurements. We focus on two reconstruction
paradigms: variational and statistical. In the variational approach, the
reconstructed signal is solution to an optimization problem that establishes a
tradeoff between fidelity to the data and smoothness conditions via a quadratic
regularization associated to a linear operator. In the statistical approach,
the signal is modeled as a stationary random process defined from a Gaussian
white noise and a whitening operator; one then looks for the optimal estimator
in the mean-square sense. We give a generic form of the reconstructed signals
for both approaches, allowing for a rigorous comparison of the two.We fully
characterize the conditions under which the two formulations yield the same
solution, which is a periodic spline in the case of sampling measurements. We
also show that this equivalence between the two approaches remains valid on
simulations for a broad class of problems. This extends the practical range of
applicability of the variational method.
