A fractal approach to the classification of Mediterranean vegetation types in remotely sensed images

A method is presented to assess fractal dimensions from remotely sensed images. The method is a three-dimensional version of the walking dividers method which has been applied to two digital images of southern France to distinguish various types of Mediterranean landscape units. The first image is a Landsat Thematic Mapper image, while the second image was acquired by the airborne Geophysical Environmental Research Imaging Spectrometer. The method has been tested on some artificial images to demonstrate procedures and results. The method can distinguish range-lands, maquis and closed garrigue and to a lesser extent agricultural regions on the TM image. Fractal dimensions for open garrigue and badlands are similar. However, the reflection properties of the land-cover units do not behave like real fractals at the scale considered, and different methods to compute the fractal dimension do not yield the same results. Results of the airborne image are disappointing, probably due to somewhat poor image quality. Finally, some advantages and disadvantages of the method are discussed.