Abstract: Fractals have been intriguing objects. Starting as pathological figure to mathematical curiosities, they have finally found applications across a number of disciplines. In this project we concentrate on a specific class of fractals which arise as attractors of certain dynamical systems, the so called IFS fractals. In this project, we first investigated the mathematical basis underlying IFS fractals and their generalizations to PIFS, RIFS, PAA fractals. We then looked at their applications to Image Generation and Coding. We analyzed/implemented some popular IFS/PIFS based Fractal Image Coding schemes, in the process integrating them into one design framework. Currently we are exploring some ideas towards improving such schemes mainly with respect to two performance criteria - time of encoding & fidelity of encoding. We are also looking at some theoretical issues like the (eventual) contractivity of a PIFS, distortion metrics, reduced dimension encoding etc.
