Seeing textons in context

Texton theory holds that visual texture segregation occurs through the preattentive detection of local differences in primitive visual units called “textons.” Three textons have been proposed for shape: lines, line terminators, and line intersections. The experiments reported here show that line closure also behaves like a texton under some conditions. In addition, the experiments show that texture segregation is not determined by texton differences per se, but by the extent to which the unique textons in a region are salient in the context of the textons common to regions. This suggests that preattentive vision is not as simple minded as texton theory claims it to be.