Comparison of gliding box and box-counting methods in river network analysis

Abstract

We use multifractal analysis to estimate the Rényi dimensions of river basins by two different partition methods. These methods differ in the way that the Euclidian plane support of the measure is covered, partitioning it by using mutually exclusive boxes or by gliding a box over the plane. Images of two different drainage basins, for the Ebro and Tajo rivers, located in Spain, were digitalized with a resolution of 0.5 km, giving image sizes of 617 × 1059 pixels and 515 × 1059, respectively. Box sizes were chosen as powers of 2, ranging from 2×4 pixels to 512×1024 pixels located within the image, with the purpose of covering the entire network. The resulting measures were plotted versus the logarithmic value of the box area instead of the box size length. Multifractal Analysis (MFA) using a box counting algorithm was carried out according to the method of moments ranging from -5