Future application of fractal maths in computer...imaging (I think) *spawn

Of those models that can be epxressed as fractals. Some (lots) of datatypes can't. The perfect exact mathematical solution for a cube or sphere isn't a fractal.

And if you have a massive array if Retina displays, 2,000,000 by 1,500,000 pixels say, and a source image of 1024x768, upscaling it to that display will result in low-resolution mess up close. And if you take a 2,000,000 x 1,500,000 source image and compress it, you are employing lossy methods. I dare say a fractal compression and upscale would give better results than a wavelet compression and fancy upscale, but it's still a limited solution.

 

We already have the 'infinite resolution' version of the scene, why would we want a new method to invent incorrect data to replace what we already have?

 

Say it isn't so, I saw an episode of CSI where they did this and you could read the text on that newspaper!

I think the steampoweredgod is getting confused between two different things.
These bitmap images that use "fractals" are not the same thing as a maths formular for fractals.
The images are finite, while the maths formular is infinate - they are totally different.

I have not seen the documentry but it probably lumps them together as one.

Now it is feasable you could describe an image with a complex formulae but it would be so massivly complex it would not give you any advantage.

 

Vector text has infinite resolution and it has nothing to do with fractals, its just math

 

Related to this, in a previous life, I helped develop a vector graphics rendering/painting system where the geometry and rendering was done in float (with coverage-based AA). The demos would usually contain models at multiple scales and so things would keep on appearing as you zoomed further and further in....until you got to the point where the floats hit the denorm limit and suddenly all the smooth spline edges became saw teeth!

 

You found the Atoms then !

I remember in school we had this CAD drawing program on the BBC that had a weird joystick, I was facinated by hiding little bits of text at microscoptic level. Id be quite interested in a game where you zoom in on things.

 

Exactly the same way as you can have hash collisions you WILL have "fractal collisions" when trying to represent something with less data than in the original.

Also,
http://www.femtosoft.biz/fractals/fractal.html
"I've been able to achieve compression on the order of a gif or jpg file."

I tried his delphi app to compress a 1680x1050 minecraft screenshot and it tells me it takes around 1000 minutes on a 2.8GHz i7

Doesn't sound all that efficient to me. Do you happen to have any better stuff I can play around with or does it all exist just in theory?

[edit]
This just keeps on getting better and better.

I tried compressing a 400x220 picture (same screenshot resized) and it gave me 61.1kb file. Original .bmp was 257kb, png 102kb and jpg at 95% quality 39kb so I thought it wasn't quite a disaster at reducing the file size.

And then I decompressed the fractal to find out that it's only grayscale! Same image in grayscale BMP: 86.9kb, png: 48.1kb and jpg 33.9kb. So yeah, a lossless PNG is better than fractal, at least for this image:


It would be fun to test it with actual photos or at least some 2kx2k textures used in games. I wouldn't be surprised if the result is even worse due to minecraft having so huge texel sizes on screen.

 

Take a look at this page
http://users.senet.com.au/~mjbone/Fractals.html

They have links to the early iterated systems exe;s who originally came up with the method and format FIF,
It was combined as a compression / resize originally. But these days the same tech continued "Genuine Fractals" and the emphasis is on the resizing it became "Perfect Resize": http://www.ononesoftware.com

How good is it? Thats a debate, I can't say I've seen a decent real test - normally they just compare it with the some what dated photoshop resampling

 

Their app doesn't work in 64bit windows. I'll see if I can get it to work in VM.

 

I'm afraid steampoweredgod is not available to answer at the moment. If you'd like to leave your name and number, he'll never get back to you...

Even then, the fractal enlargements are clearly upscaled. They aren't filling in any convincing details. I'm wondering if a simple bicubic upscale with a little blur and peturbation wouldn't give the same sorts of results at a lot less effort.

Fundamentally, I'm not seeing any application of fractals in image resizing or storage. They'll remain used for procedural content creation and that's about it.

 

Steamy's problem is his argument is based on what he imagines fractal compression to be, not what it actually is.

 

I'm not sure that was his only problem to be honest.

 

What do you mean? Are you saying this isn't normal!?

http://steampoweredgod.blogspot.com/2012/03/so-it-seems-people-have-accelerated.html

Dunno seems pretty legit stuff to me...

 

Yar, Interesting Blog..

 

fractal's place is in procedural textures/geometry
microtextures aren't so far off
see allegorithmic middleware
fractals are ok for filling in the gaps but don't represent true information

regarding the OP you'd just smooth and/or apply jitter to geometry (displacement maps) for resolution independence

 

I'm just pulling stuff out my ass here... but...

So you can project spatial data to a frequency domain with Fourier transforms. Can you similarly project spatial data to some, oh let's call it 'recursive domain' where the basis are recursive patterns? Does it even make any sense?

 

micro textures on displacement maps for objects that are supposed to be rough
guess the type of micro texture per texel from the surrounding area of the real modeled detail or allow artists to paint it

 

Doesn't need fractal though. Any suitable procedural algorithm could be used.