Multiscaling and information content of natural color images

Abstract

Naive scale invariance is not a true property of natural images. Natural monochrome images posses a much richer geometrical structure, that is particularly well described in terms of multiscaling relations. This means that the pixels of a given image can be decomposed into sets, the fractal components of the image, with well-defined scaling exponents (Turiel & Parga, submitted). Here it is shown that multispectral representations of natural scenes also exhibit multiscaling properties, observing the same kind of behavior. A precise measure of the informational relevance of the fractal components is also given, and it is shown that there are important differences between the intrinsically redundant RGB system and the decorrelated one defined in (Ruderman, Cronin & Chiao, 1998).