Fractal Image Compression > Advantages of Fractal Image Compression > Compact Representation of Complex Textures

Fractal compression can represent highly detailed textures using relatively compact transformation systems.

Some textures are difficult for traditional codecs because they contain:

•stochastic detail,

•irregular repetition,

•or recursive visual patterns.

Fractal approaches may encode such regions efficiently because they identify internal structural relationships instead of storing each detail separately.

This was especially interesting for:

•terrain rendering,

•procedural graphics,

•scientific visualization,

•and texture databases.

In some cases, complex natural-looking patterns could emerge from surprisingly small mathematical descriptions.