Perception of 3D slant from textures with and without aligned spectral components

The image of a textured surface provides multiple potential cues that could be used to perceive its 3D structure. When a surface texture has oriented structure, perspective convergence of the oriented components provides a texture cue, in addition to texture scaling and compression. Some findings suggest that oriented spectral components aligned with the direction of slant are important for 3D perception from texture, but this has only been demonstrated in restricted situations. In this study, we tested the contribution of oriented spectral components for planar surface patches with varied slant (0°-80°) and field of view (16° and 6°). Observers viewed simulated textured surfaces and estimated slant to the perceived surfaces. The simulated textures were octotropic plaids with a full range of orientations, or with either the aligned or perpendicular plaid components removed. We measured perceptual bias in monocular conditions and also the relative weighting of texture and stereo information in binocular conditions. We found that the presence of aligned spectral components did produce some improvement in slant estimates, but the effects were small and only observed in some conditions. There were no detectable differences in texture cue weights. Our results demonstrate that aligned spectral components contribute to perception of slant from texture, but suggest that the contribution is limited when other texture cues are available and informative. Our findings are consistent with the notion that the visual system utilizes multiple sources of texture information for 3D perception.