The Role of Visual Attributes in the Perception of Texture and Motion

The human visual system uses a variety of cues to do the common but often not easy task of identifying groups of visual targets into perceptual categories. Visual attributes include such features as color, orientation, luminance, spatial frequency, and so on. Two widely studied properties of visual targets are texture and motion. This project will investigate some of the interactions between features of texture and motion perception, how those interactions may be important for perceptual grouping, and how the resulting data may improve existing neurophysiologically plausible computational models for texture segregation. A novel class of stimuli with multiple attributes has been developed for these tests. Data from the proposed experiments are likely to have an impact not only on visual neuroscience, but on image processing, machine vision and pattern recognition, and scientific visualization.