This paper presents a novel and non-destructive approach to the appearance characterization and classification of commercial pork, turkey and chicken ham slices. Ham slice images were modelled using directional fractal (DF0 ° ; 45 ° ; 90 ° ; 135 °) dimensions and a minimum distance classifier was adopted to perform the classification task. Also, the role of different colour spaces and the resolution level of the images on DF analysis were investigated. This approach was applied to 480 wafer thin ham slices from four types of hams (120 slices per type): i.e., pork (cooked and smoked), turkey (smoked) and chicken (roasted). DF features were extracted from digitalized intensity images in greyscale, and R, G, B, L*, a*, b*, H, S, and V colour components for three image resolution levels (100%, 50%, and 25%). Simulation results show that in spite of the complexity and high variability in colour and texture appearance, the modelling of ham slice images with DF dimensions allows the capture of differentiating textural features between the four commercial ham types. Independent DF features entail better discrimination than that using the average of four directions. However, DF dimensions reveal a high sensitivity to colour channel, orientation and image resolution for the fractal analysis. The classification accuracy using six DF dimension features (a90 °*, a135 °*, H0 °, H45 °, S0 °, H90 °) was 93.9% for training data and 82.2% for testing data. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.