**Abstract**

Scale effect is a crucial scientific problem in quantitative remote sensing (RS), and scholars attempt to solve it with scale conversion models, which can characterize the numerical relationship of RS land surface parameters at different resolutions (scales). As a significant land surface parameter, scale conversion of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) has been studied for a long time. Therefore, taking NDVI as an example, the development of scaling research is described and analyzed in the paper, and based on fractal theory, the development trends are discussed for land surface parameters in quantitative remote sensing. These are our conclusions: it will be the new trend to establish downscaling models based on fractal theory for land surface parameters in quantitative remote sensing; additionally, it still is the hotspot to establish spatiotemporal scale conversion models for land surface parameters in quantitative remote sensing in the future, and addressed on that, the multi-fractal scaling methodology is proposed, and its availability is analyzed in the paper, which presents significant potential.

**Keywords:** remote sensing (RS), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), scaling, fractal, iterated function system (IFS), multi-fractal
