Fractal Surface Models For Communication About Terrain
Alex Pentland · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1987
In this paper we use the Fractal surface model [Pentland 83] to describe complex. natural 3-D surfaces in a manner that mimics human perceptual judgments of surface structure (e.g., "peaks," "ridges," or "valleys"- ). We describe how real surfaces can be decomposed into such descriptions using a minimal-length encoding procedure. This allows us to structure the pixel data, in a manner that corresponds to the perceptual organization people impose upon the data, so that a user can point to a CRT image of digital terrain map (DTAI). say "that one." and have the machine understand the user's reference.