Abstract
NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL experiments have shown that many cells in the visual cortex of the cat and monkey respond well only if the retinal image contains a line stimulus of appropriate orientation and width (spatial frequency)1,2. Different cells are sensitive to different orientation/spatial frequency combinations and judging from numerous corroborative psychophysical experiments, it seems highly probable that similar populations of cells exist in man also3. However, the function of these cells is not known. One suggestion is that they decompose the retinal image into its two-dimensional Fourier components and that processes such as object recognition, region finding and image segmentation then operate on this Fourier description4–7. We report here experimental results on human texture discrimination which argue against this possibility by showing that textures which differ markedly in their Fourier spectrum are not always readily discriminable.
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MAYHEW, J., FRISBY, J. Texture discrimination and Fourier analysis in human vision. Nature 275, 438–439 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1038/275438a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/275438a0
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