An approximated box height for Differential-Box-Counting method to estimate fractal dimensions of gray-scale images

Abstract

The Fractal Dimension (FD) of an image defines the roughness using a real number which is highly associated with the human perception of surface roughness. It has been applied successfully for many computer vision applications such as texture analysis, segmentation and classification. Several techniques can be found in literature to estimate FD. One such technique is Differential Box Counting (DBC). Its performance is influenced by many parameters. In particular, the box height is directly related to the gray-level variations over image grid, which badly affects the performance of DBC. In this work, a new method for estimating box height is proposed without changing the other parameters of DBC. The proposed box height has been determined empirically and depends only on the image size. All the experiments have been performed on simulated Fractal Brownian Motion (FBM) Database and Brodatz Database. It has been proved experimentally that the proposed box height allow to improve the performance of DBC, Shifting DBC, Improved DBC and Improved Triangle DBC, which are closer to actual FD values of the simulated FBM images.