Image descriptors based on fractal transform analysis

The Fractal Transform (FT) was originally introduced as a methodology for compressing digital images and representing them at different scales. The process of calculating an FT generates a great dear of information about the affine similarities and dissimilarities of an image, most of which is discarded in compression applications. In this paper we introduce the concept of Fractal Transform Analysis and use it to derive new image descriptors. We present results of experiments in which description schemes comprised of some of these FT-based descriptors are applied to the problems of finding objects in an image similar to a given object, of indexing images, and of querying an image database consisting of about 17,000 images. Complexity and timing data are also presented.