An efficient implementation of the gliding box lacunarity algorithm

Lacunarity is a measure of how data fills space. It complements fractal dimension, which measures how much space is filled. Many researchers use the gliding box algorithm to calculate lacunarity. This paper introduces a fast algorithm for making this calculation. This algorithm is akin to fast box-counting algorithms used by some researchers to estimate fractal dimension. A simplified gliding box measure equation, along with key pseudo code implementations for the algorithm, are presented. Applications for the gliding box lacunarity measure have ranged from biological community modelling to target detection.