Spatial nonlinearities in the instantaneous perception of textures with identical power spectra

In 1962, Julesz observed that texture pairs with identical second-order statistics but different third- and higher-order statistics were usually not discriminable without scrutiny. Since second-order (dipole) statistics determine the autocorrelation functions and hence the power spectra, this observation also meant that in preattentive perception of texture the phase (position) spectra were ignored. In the last two decades many new classes of texture pairs with identical power spectra have been invented that were not effortlessly discriminable; however, recently (Caelli & Julesz 1978; Caelli et al. 1978; Julesz et al. 1978) several counterexamples were found. In these texture pairs with identical power spectra some local structures of 'quasi-collinearity', 'corner', 'closure' and 'granularity' yielded strong discrimination. These features can be regarded as the fundamental building blocks of form, that is, the essential nonlinearities of the preattentive perceptual system. Here, it will be shown that these counter-examples are not independent of each other, but can be described by two elementary units; bars (line segments) and their terminators. Furthermore, the preattentive texture perception system can count the number of terminators but ignores their positions.