A revisitation of the triangular prism surface area method for estimating the fractal dimension of fractal surfaces

Fractal dimension is widely used to give a measure of variability and roughness of curves, signals, objects, statistical distributions, and so on. We found that an often used method, the so-called triangular prism surfacearea method, for estimating the fractal dimension of fractal surfaces possesses some intrinsic mistakes in application. This note describes the misinterpretation and suggests the proper application, that we call Revised Triangular Prism Method (RTPM). To show its feasibility we apply RTPM to some synthetic Euclidean and fractal surfaces of known dimension.