Theories of visual texture perception

The development of theories of visual texture perception is reviewed in the context of recent computational approaches. Visual texture is difficult to define precisely; one definition is that it is the visual phenomenon underlying the perception of the texture of surfaces of objects. There have been two major thrusts in thinking about texture segregation phenomena: one begins with the stimulus intensity distribution and the other with the perceptual entities that it contains. The history of the development of these two schools of thought can be described as a slow convergence toward an intermediate point. The former approach is characteristic of the work of L. A. Jones and other authors in the 1940s and early 1950s and of the early work of Bela Julesz and his various colleagues in the 1960s and early 1970s. The other approach is characteristic of the work of Jacob Beck and other perceptual psychological work on texture, which has its roots in the Gestalt theories of grouping and integration. The constructs used in recent computational work in texture modeling exist at a level somewhere between a simple description of image intensities and a true representation of meaningful perceptual objects.