Fractal Image Compression

Date: 05/27/97 at 14:35:04
From: Jason Bratcher
Subject: Fractals

How do you use fractals?

Date: 05/28/97 at 14:39:11
From: Doctor Sarah
Subject: Re: Fractals

Hi Jason,

I can't tell from your e-mail how much background you need on 
fractals, so you might first want to look at this answer in our Dr. 
Math archives for the basics and some good Web sites to visit.

  http://mathforum.org/dr.math/problems/brandin4.1.97.html   

There's also information to be found by searching the archives for the 
word "fractal" (just the word, not the quotes).  Locate the searcher 
from the URL at the bottom of this message.

Now - how are people using fractals?  Probably one of the most well-
known uses is for fractal image compression.

Much of the information on the web is quite complex.  Here's an 
article from American Scientist that's a pretty good place to start:

  http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/issues/Sciobs96/Sciobs96-09image.html   

An excerpt:
                     Fractal Image Compression

                             Mike May

A little experience wandering the World Wide Web reveals that storing 
a digitized image, especially a high-resolution one, requires lots of 
memory. Viewing some homepages, for instance, is a painfully slow 
process even with a high-speed connection: While image files pour 
avalanches of bytes into your computer's memory, the page grows line 
by line on your monitor. Image storage and reconstruction may prove 
even more troublesome in the CD-ROM business, where someone might want 
to put thousands of images on a disk. Microsoft's Encarta CD-ROM 
encyclopedia, in fact, contains about 7,000 photographs. Getting them 
all on one disk required a technique called fractal image compression.

Here is a Web site from which you can find links to more information:

  http://inls.ucsd.edu/y/Fractals/index.html   

-Doctor Sarah,  The Math Forum
 Check out our web site!  http://mathforum.org/dr.math/