Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!philmtl!philabs!ttidca!schear
From: schear@ttidca.TTI.COM (Steve Schear)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: SigGraph Fractal Compression
Message-ID: <5541@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Date: 22 Aug 89 02:07:43 GMT
References: <2037@netcom.UUCP> <20400002@inmet>
Reply-To: schear@ttidca.tti.com (Steve Schear)
Organization: Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica
Lines: 16

In article <20400002@inmet> rich@inmet writes:
>
>
>	What I meant is you can reproduce your image at any resolution.  The 
>fractals equations are resolution independent.  So this scheme works as an image
>enlarger/reducer.
>
Well, while it is true that the fractal algorithms can generate images over
any arbitrarily large range of scale, the resulting images may bear little
resemblance to the objects being modeled.  Work by Alex Pentland has shown
that most natural images exhibit fractal similarity generally over a range
 of between 4-8 to one.  That is, knowing the fractal dimension of object, one
can, with some degree of confidence, predict the fractal dimension of that 
same object at (for instance) one fourth the known dimension.  
Zooming to greater magnifications will typically yield only "imaginative" 
results.