Abstract

Various attempts have been made to describe the human ability to use texture information to define perceptual regions. Some of these have used statistical measures of structure while others have been based on differences in occurrence of certain features. We have tried a very simple approach based on the local energy present in concentric and oriented linear receptive fields. Measures of this kind can account for a number of observed phenomena: (1) In a texture made up of randomly oriented L and + shaped elements, strong segregation is ob­served if the line segments forming the elements are of the same length. If the + elements are enlarged slightly (10–20%), the segregation be­comes much weaker. (2) If the size of the elements in a texture is reduced while the average spacing between them is kept constant, the segregation also becomes weaker.

© 1986 Optical Society of America