Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/H53181/01
Title:	COMPUTATIONAL AND PSYCHOPHYSICAL STUDIES OF NATURAL TEXTURE
Principal Investigator:	Watt, Professor R
Other Investigators:	Kay, Dr J
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Psychology
Organisation:	University of Stirling
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 August 1992	Ends:	31 January 1996	Value (£):	119,886
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Vision & Senses - ICT appl.
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
To test a computational procedure for measuring the degree of similarity between natural texture images. To discover what are the common types of structure in natural textures. To develop a computational method for describing natural textures and their variations. To develop a technique for applying the methods of psychophysics to natural texture images. To assess, psychophysically, several different models of texture perception.Progress:Progress on this project to date has been as planned. A major conceptual framework has been developed to deal with the main problems in understanding the visual processing and perception of natural textures. A large database of images have been obtained, and will shortly be made available to anyone via Internet. Eight basic sets of images have been captured and digitised: noise, Brownian noise, wilderness scenes, town scenes, manmade objects, natural objects, manmade textures, and natural textures. These image sets have been used for various different computational studies on the project. Important results to date involve explorations of the information contained in the modelled responses of known visual neurones to the different sets of images. It has been shown that 'simple cell' like processes are suitably responsive to structures in all classes of real image (ie not noise), but that they do not readily distinguish between different sets of real image, and that moreover the magnitude of simple cell like response is not a good indicator of the presence or absence of important information in an image. Further processing, to assess the spatial distributions of response are required to achieve this. The research is now in the phase of using psychophysical tests, both with more standard synthetic stimuli and with the image database described above, to test various models of how the visual system might analyse spatial relationships in simple-cell responses. The work has been disseminated through international conferences, including a very prestigious invitation to speak to the Principal Investigator at a conference organised to honour Bela Julesz, one of the people who has played the greatest part in the study of texture vision to date. Several papers have been published or are in press, and more are presently under preparation.
Key Findings
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Potential use in non-academic contexts
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Impacts
Description This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk Summary Date Materialised
Sectors submitted by the Researcher
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Project URL:
Further Information:
Organisation Website:	http://www.stir.ac.uk