This paper addresses the characterization of spatial arrangements of fringes in catalysts imaged by High Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy (HRTEM). It presents a statistical model-based approach for analyzing these fringes. The proposed approach involves Fractional Brownian Field (FBF) and 2-D AutoRegressive (AR) modeling, as well as morphological analysis. The originality of the approach consists in identifying the image background as an FBF, subtracting this background, modeling the residual by 2-D AR so as to capture fringe information and, finally, discriminating catalysts from fringe characterizations obtained by morphological analysis. The overall analysis is called ARFBF (Auto-Regressive Fractional Brownian Field) based morphology characterization.