AN INTRODUCTION TO FRACTALS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS IN ELECTRICAL-ENGINEERING

We present a very brief history of fractals, describe their generation, their characteristics, and their relation with chaos. We point to where and why fractals and chaotic systems are commonly found in nature, which implies that they should be good candidates for modeling different types of real world signals. We then list a number of diverse research areas in electrical engineering where fractals and fractal-based techniques have found applications. Finally, we present in some detail applications of fractals in signal processing, mole specifically in the areas of digital image modeling, synthesis, and compression.