Abstract

Texture informs our interpretation of the visual world. It provides a cue to the shape and orientation of a surface, to segmenting an image into meaningful regions, and to classifying those regions, e.g. in terms of material properties. This chapter discusses recent advances in understanding of segmentation and representation of visual texture. Successful models have described texture by a rich set of image statistics rather than by the features of discrete, pre-segmented texture elements. Texture processing mechanisms may also underlie important phenomena in peripheral vision known as crowding. If true, such mechanisms would influence the information available for object recognition, scene perception, and many visual-cognitive tasks.