thumb|right| Figure 1. Basic fractal patterns increasing in lacunarity from left to right. thumb|right| The same images as above, rotated 90°. Whereas the first two images appear essentially the same as they do above, the third looks different from its unrotated original. This feature is captured in measures of lacunarity listed across the top of the figures, as calculated using standard biological imaging box counting software .
thumb|right| Figure 1. Basic fractal patterns increasing in lacunarity from left to right. thumb|right| The same images as above, rotated 90°. Whereas the first two images appear essentially the same as they do above, the third looks different from its unrotated original. This feature is captured in measures of lacunarity listed across the top of the figures, as calculated using standard biological imaging box counting software .
Lacunarity, from the Latin lacuna, meaning "gap" or "lake", is a specialized term in geometry referring to a measure of how patterns, especially fractals, fill space, where patterns having more or larger gaps generally have higher lacunarity. Beyond being an intuitive measure of gappiness, lacunarity can quantify additional features of patterns such as "rotational invariance" and more generally, heterogeneity. This is illustrated in Figure 1 showing three fractal patterns. When rotated 90°, the first two fairly homogeneous patterns do not appear to change, but the third more heterogeneous figure does change and has correspondingly higher lacunarity. The earliest reference to the term in geometry is usually attributed to Benoit Mandelbrot, who, in 1983 or perhaps as early as 1977, introduced it as, in essence, an adjunct to fractal analysis. Lacunarity analysis is now used to characterize patterns in a wide variety of fields and has application in multifractal analysis in particular (see Applications).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).