Fractal mapping for sea surface anomalies recognition

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether fractal maps extracted from sea SAR images are useful for discriminating the sea from other entities or anomalies. Fractal mapping consists of locally estimating the fractal dimension of the image. To this purpose four different methods based on covering and spectral analysis are proposed and compared when applied to real ERS1-2 GEC images. Wind falls, sea and line coast are well distinguishable in the fractal maps. This result clearly shows that the use of image fractal processing is a promising and powerful technique for identifying sea surface anomalies.