Multiscaling and information content of natural color images

Naive scale invariance is not a true property of natural images. Natural monochrome images possess a much richer geometrical structure, which is particularly well described in terms of multiscaling relations. This means that the pixels of a given image can be decomposed into sets, the fractal components of the image, with well-defined scaling exponents [Turiel and Parga, Neural Comput. 12, 763 (2000)]. Here it is shown that hyperspectral representations of natural scenes also exhibit multiscaling properties, observing the same kind of behavior. A precise measure of the informational relevance of the fractal components is also given, and it is shown that there are important differences between the intrinsically redundant red-green-blue system and the decorrelated one defined in Ruderman, Cronin, and Chiao [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 15, 2036 (1998)].