KETpic Matlab Binding for Efficient Handling of Fractal Images

Abstract

Fractals are among the most exciting and intriguing mathematical objects ever discovered. Because of the spectacular development of technology - and particularly computers and computer science - during the last decades, they have become very popular not only in scientific and technological domains but also in mass media related fields such as advertising, computer art, computer design, computer animation and many others. Nowadays there is a wealth of programs and tools to generate fractals by computer. However, none of them is able to yield high-quality graphical output to be readily embedded into standard LaTeX source code in a text-like form. This paper is aimed at filling this gap by introducing a new and freely available KETPic add-on for generating and rendering IFS fractal objects. This new software, developed in the popular scientific program Matlab, generates LaTeXreadable code so that image files are no longer invoked nor required. The resulting files are astonishingly small when compared with their image file counterparts, thus leading to higher compression ratios than other conventional formats such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, EPS and the like. In addition, since IFS fractals are auto-similar they still offer better quality. In fact, a great advantage of this method is that any final image encoded as a collection of IFS becomes resolution independent and hence it can be enlarged at will in a lossless fashion. This paper describes our program and gives some examples to illustrate the excellent performance of our approach.