Spline functions have received widespread attention in the fields of image sampling and reconstruction. To enhance the performance of splines in reconstruction and reduce the computational burden of solving large linear equations, we propose a family of generalized cardinal polishing splines (GCP-splines) and provide a system of linear equations to obtain the expressions of GCP-splines. First, we propose a cardinal polishing spline basis function with high-precision. Then, we propose a class of GCP-splines and give a general theory of GCP-splines. To calculate the expressions of GCP-splines, we adopt a system of linear equations to obtain the time shifts operator and the convolutional coefficients based on the search spacing and number of terms. Finally, we propose continuous and discrete interpolation models based on GCP-splines, and demonstrate several valuable properties, such as order of approximation and the Riesz basis. To evaluate the performance of GCP-splines, we conduct several experiments on test images from different modalities. The experimental results demonstrate that the GCP-splines for image interpolation and image denoising have better performance and outperform other methods.