title: Tug-of-war lacunarity-A novel approach for estimating lacunarity.
abstract: Modern instrumentation provides us with massive repositories of digital images that will likely only increase in the future. Therefore, it has become increasingly important to automatize the analysis of digital images, e.g., with methods from pattern recognition. These methods aim to quantify the visual appearance of captured textures with quantitative measures. As such, lacunarity is a useful multi-scale measure of texture's heterogeneity but demands high computational efforts. Here we investigate a novel approach based on the tug-of-war algorithm, which estimates lacunarity in a single pass over the image. We computed lacunarity for theoretical and real world sample images, and found that the investigated approach is able to estimate lacunarity with low uncertainties. We conclude that the proposed method combines low computational efforts with high accuracy, and that its application may have utility in the analysis of high-resolution images.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Physics, NAWI Graz, University of Graz, A-8010 Graz, Austria.
authors.forename: Martin A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Reiss
authors.affiliation: Institute of Physics, NAWI Graz, University of Graz, A-8010 Graz, Austria.
authors.forename: Birgit
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Lemmerer
authors.affiliation: Institute of Physics, NAWI Graz, University of Graz, A-8010 Graz, Austria.
authors.forename: Arnold
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hanslmeier
authors.affiliation: Institute of Biophysics, Medical University of Graz, A-8010 Graz, Austria.
authors.forename: Helmut
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ahammer