Human Factors and Behavioral Science: Textons, The Fundamental Elements in Preattentive Vision and Perception of Textures

In this article we give an overview of some insights into the workings of the human visual system gained during two decades of research at Bell Laboratories, and culminating in the discovery of a few local conspicuous features that we call textons. Textons appear to be the basic units of preattentive texture perception, 1 when textures are viewed in a quick glance with no further effort or analysis. Although this article goes beyond texture perception into preattentive vision in general, studies of texture discrimination led to the basic insights presented here and provide excellent demonstrations of the main findings. Based on our findings we propose a novel theory of vision in which the preattentive visual system inspects a large portion of the visual field in parallel and detects only density differences in textons. It then directs focal attention to these loci of texton differences for detailed scrutiny. Now, after 20 years of research, when we know what textons are and their role in vision is clarified, we can save the reader from following the rather difficult steps that led to their discovery. [The reader interested in the history of these developments, and in the sophisticated mathematics necessary to generate textures with certain stochastic constraints, should turn to the original articles referred to in a recent review by one of us 1 and to the Appendix.] Here we follow an axiomatic treatment. The main findings are presented in Section II as heuristics (similar to axioms, but not necessarily totally independent), immediately followed by many demonstrations.