Fractal and multifractal analysis: A review

Over the last years, fractal and multifractal geometries were applied extensively in many medical signal (1D, 2D or 3D) analysis applications like pattern recognition, texture analysis and segmentation. Application of this geometry relies heavily on the estimation of the fractal features. Various methods were proposed to estimate the fractal dimension or multifractal spectral of a signal. This article presents an overview of these algorithms, the way they work, their benefits and their limits. The aim of this review is to explain and to categorize the various algorithms into groups and their application in the field of medical signal analysis. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.