Significantly different textures: A computational model of pre-attentive texture segmentation

Abstract

Recent human vision research [1] suggests modelling preattentive texture segmentation by taking a set of feature samples from a local region on each side of a hypothesized edge, and then performing standard statistical tests to determine if the two samples differ significantly in their mean or variance. If the difference is significant at a specified level of confidence, a human observer will tend to pre-attentively see a texture edge at that location. I present an algorithm based upon these results, with a well specified decision stage and intuitive, easily fit parameters. Previous models of pre-attentive texture segmentation have poorly specified decision stages, more unknown free parameters, and in some cases incorrectly model human performance. The algorithm uses heuristics for guessing the orientation of a texture edge at a given location, thus improving computational efficiency by performing the statistical tests at only one orientation for each spatial location.