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Textural segmentation, second-order statistics, and textural elements

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Abstract

Beck (1972, 1973) hypothesized that textural segmentation occurs strongly on the basis of simple properties such as brightness, color, size, and the slopes of contours and lines of the elemental descriptors of a texture or textural elements. The experiment reported supports the hypothesis that specific stimulus features, rather than second-order statistics, account for textural segmentation. The results agree with Julesz (1981a, b) who has reported evidence disproving his original conjecture of the importance of second-order statistics. Julesz (1981a, b) now hypothesizes textural segmentation to be a function of local features which he called textons. Textons are features that give textural segmentation when textures have identical second-order statistics. The two hypotheses are to date in complete agreement on the stimulus features producing textural segmentation, and the experiment reported is consistent with both.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA

    Jacob Beck

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  1. Jacob Beck
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This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant MCS-79-23-4222 to the Computer Vision Laboratory, University of Maryland. I am grateful to David Notley and Peter Hyde for writing the programs that generated the stimuli and computed the dipole statistics, and to Azriel Rosenfeld for valuable discussions

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Beck, J. Textural segmentation, second-order statistics, and textural elements. Biol. Cybern. 48, 125–130 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00344396

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00344396

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