Realizing the Box-counting Method for Calculating Fractal Dimension of Urban Form Based on Remote Sensing Image

A lot of phenomena have fractal characteristics (Chen and Chen, 1998), including the city we human being build. In the research of fractal cities, fractal dimension is very important (Chen, 2005). It can describe the fractal characteristic of the city. And, through the process of calculating the fractal dimension, we also can determine whether a city is a fractal object. Scholars often calculate the fractal dimension of the city when they do the city research. And they will introduce the method of calculating the fractal dimension. For example, Chinese scholar Fengjian in his paper of Spatial-temporal Evolution of Urban Morphology and land use structure in Hang Zhou (Feng, 2003), Israelite scholar Benguigui in his paper of when and where is a city fractal?(Benguigui, 2000). But few scholars will introduce the steps of the realization of calculating the fractal dimension in details. In fact, since the amount of data of calculating the fractal dimension is very large, it is very meaningful to work out a kind of quick and easy way to calculate the fractal dimension. There are three methods to calculate the fractal dimension of urban form: using geometry measure relationship; using turning radius method; using the box-counting method. We will use the box-counting method to calculate the fractal dimension and introduce two ways to realize it. According to the file formats used in operation, we name them as vector method and grid method. In our paper we will introduce the steps and the key techniques in details and compare these two ways in a certain degree.