An improved fractal-based interpolation method for terrain imagery zooming

To get a terrain image in high spatial resolution, some algorithms are chosen to interpolate the existing coarse terrain data. It is proved that the fractal-based methods can lead to better visual quality than traditional ones such as the bilinear method and bicubic method, etc. However, the familiar method based on the fractal Brownian function model has shown its drawback when the terrain contains flat regions such as desert and ocean, since in these cases, the fractal features can not be calculated over flat regions and many unexpected ripples are created. This paper presents a new fractal-based interpolation algorithm for terrain imagery zooming that avoids unexpected rippling in the flat region while the local self-similarity is considered. The experimental results show that this technique can be applied to simulating terrain images produced by the optical sensor of a satellite at various altitudes