Textons, the elements of texture perception, and their interactions.

Research with texture pairs having identical second-order statistics has revealed that the pre-attentive texture discrimination system cannot globally process third- and higher-order statistics, and that discrimination is the result of a few local conspicuous features, called textons. It seems that only the first-order statistics of these textons have perceptual significance, and the relative phase between textons cannot be perceived without detailed scrutiny by focal attention.