Fractal Dimension Calculated Based On Remote Sensing Images Of Urban Form

Fractal theory is promoted by the famous scientist Mandelbrot in 1975 in his book Fractal: form, change and dimension. Fractal theory is used to research the fragment and irregular phenomena. It has a broad application field. Many urban geographers apply the fractal theory in the urban research. They find cities are also irregular geometry forms. Therefore, plenty of the complex phenomena can be solved by the fractal theory.In the research of the fractal cities, many scholars will calculate the fractal dimension of the urban form. For example, the Chinese scholar Fengjian calculated the fractal dimension of Hang Zhou in his paper of Spatial-temporal evolution of urban morphology and land use structure in Hang Zhou. The Israelite scholar Benguigui calculated the fractal dimension of the Tel Aviv metropolis in his paper of when and where is a city fractal. In their paper, these scholars will introduce the way of calculating the fractal dimension and use the result to analyze the fractal characteristic of the city. But few scholars will introduce the steps of the realization of the calculation in details. For example, Benguigui introduced the process of the box-counting method, but he didn't tell us how he got the data of the nun-empty grids. In fact, since the amount of data for calculation is very large, it is very meaningful to create a way that can obtain those data automatically.According to this, this paper will introduce two methods to realize the box-counting method automatically. Based on the file format used in the manipulation, they are called the vector method and the grid method respectively. And we will introduce the realization process through an example of the urban form of Beijing. The data source which will be used is the Landsat ETM data.The vector method will be realized through the intersect analysis in ArcView. The key of the grid method is a recursive algorithm calculating the number of the...