Texton gradients: The texton theory revisited

A brief outline of the texton theory was given in several review papers (Julesz and Bergen 1983; Julesz 1984a, b, 1985) without going into details. Here a more complete version of the texton theory is presented, with emphasis on the critical distances within which the density of textons is determined by the preattentive system. Particularly some recent findings by Sagi and Julesz (1985a, b) influenced the current version of the texton theory. The stimuli are restricted to drawing composed of line segments that permit a precise definition of neighborhoods and distances to which the line segments and texture elements have to be confined in order to quality for preattentive texture discrimination. These critical distances and the aperture of focal attention are scaled by the average size of the texture elements. Furthermore, it is stressed that even when the stimuli are restricted to line segments, the blobs outlined by line segments behave like textons. The preattentive system ignores the exact shape of these blobs, but is sensitive to their average width, length, and orientation.