When is scene recognition just texture recognition?

Subjects were asked to discriminate scenes after very brief exposures (37-69 ms). Their performance was always above chance and increased with exposure duration, confirming that subjects can get the gist of a scene with one fixation. We propose that a simple texture analysis of the image can provide a useful cue towards rapid scene identification. Our model learns texture features across scene categories and then uses this knowledge to categorize new scenes. The texture analysis leads to similar categorizations and confusions as subjects with limited processing time. We conclude that a simple texture discrimination model mostly explains early scene identification.