On the imaging of fractal surfaces

Abstract

An analysis is presented of the imaging of surfaces modeled by fractal Brownian elevation functions of the sort used in computer graphics. It is shown that, if Lambertian reflectance modest surface slopes and the absence of occlusions and self shadowing are assumed, a fractal surface with Fourier power spectrum proportional to f/sup beta / produces an image with power spectrum proportional to f/sup 2- beta /; here, f is the spatial frequency and beta is related to the fractional dimension value. This allows one to use the spectral falloff of the images to predict the fractal dimension of the surface.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>