Local structure analyzers as determinants of preattentive pattern discrimination.

Contemporary literature suggests that preattentive texture or pattern discrimination is induced by differences between local structure features or "textons." This paper presents a model for the description of such local structure features based on the computation of local autocorrelations within the image. By means of this structure model a measure of structure dissimilarity is introduced. Experiments have been carried out to test a hypothesized relation between the detectability of a target pattern in a field of background patterns and the value of the structure dissimilarity measure. The experimental results show that it seems justified to relate, in a quantitative way, the detectability of the target pattern to the value of the structure dissimilarity measure.