textons
pl. n. elemental features of visual stimuli that provide the basis for preattentive segmentation of a visual scene, prior to the direction of focused attention on any one object within the scene (see feature-integration theory). There are three categories of textons: elongated blobs, with their attendant color, orientation, and width; terminators, which convey the end of a line segment; and crossings of line segments. [proposed in the 1980s by Béla Julesz]