Factors influencing psycophysically valid taxonomies of image texture

Image texture is important in human and machine vision. A taxonomy of image texture that classifies textures the same way humans do psychophysically can be used in many fields. This paper deals with one attribute of texture, namely orderliness. To determine what underlying factors influence humans to perceive orderliness in textures, psychophysical direct magnitude estimation ratings of the orderliness of 27 Brodatz images were collected from 44 subjects. The images: a) were either tiled, locally oriented, or granular, b) had large, medium, or small scale elements, and c) contained either high, medium, or low regularity. Multidimensional scaling revealed three underlying factors that determined the perception of texture orderliness: uniformity of element shape and distribution, element size, and element dimensionality. Some of these results contradict predictions made by earlier computational models of texture. Such models should be revised to incorporate the results of our experiment.