The self-similarity properties of natural images resemble those of turbulent flows

Abstract

We show that the statistics of an edge type variable in natural images exhibits self-similarity properties which resemble those of local energy dissipation in turbulent flows. Our results show that extended self-similarity remarkably holds for the statistics of the local edge variance, and that the very same models can be used to predict all the associated exponents. These results suggest to use natural images as a laboratory for testing scaling models of interest for the statistical description of turbulent flows. The properties we have exhibited are relevant for the modeling of the early visual system: they should be included in models designed for the prediction of receptive fiel$