Preattentive texture segmentation: The role of line terminations, size, and filter wavelength

AbstractThe texel pair represents a dilemma in texture discrimination because, despite having the same component orientations, discrimination is still possible (Julesz, 1981), showing a performance asymmetry. Other possible element properties that could influence this task are line terminations, closure, and the size of these elements. We found that line terminators are critical for the task; however, results from double-task experiments indicated that terminator-based discrimination requires the use of attention. When attention is not available for the task, “size” of the elements (with the considered slightly larger) seems to be critical for this discrimination and for the asymmetric performance. To generalize the concept of “size” to textures in general, further experiments were performed with textures of different-sized elements. Results showed, as past literature has indicated, that there is a performance asymmetry, with the larger of the elements being more visible when in the foreground. This asymmetry was additionally shown to reverse itself (i.e., the smaller element became the more visible) as the scale of the elements increased (while interelement distance remained fixed). A filter analysis was developed in order to measure the apparent size of these elements within textures (texsize), defined as the response weighted average of the filter wavelength, $$\bar \lambda $$ , for a group of elements. The calculation of $$\bar \lambda $$ was attained by introducing a nonlinearity after the second stage of filtering (or spatial averaging of filter responses). This analysis showed high correlation between the texture with the larger $$\bar \lambda $$ and the more visible texture. On the basis of this correlation, a wavelength-dependent noise is proposed, having more internal noise for low-spatial-frequency filters and less for high-spatial-frequency filters.