Perceptual Measurement of Surface Texture

------------------------------------------------------------------Surface appearance is a critical characteristic of nearly all of today's commodity items and plays an important role in many other aspects of our lives. While internationally accepted standards have been defined for the measurement of colour and instruments are available for the measurement of surface gloss, there are no accepted ways of measuring the complex phenomenon we know as 'texture'.A small number of studies have sought to develop perceptually meaningful methods for measuring texture. However, we believe that these experiments were significantly flawed by the use of incomplete stimuli and uncontrolled conditions (they employed still photographs of surfaces imaged under unknown illumination conditions). Our proposal differs fundamentally from previous work because: a) we will compute texture measures directly from surface descriptions rather than from images / thereby removing the significant biasing effects illumination, and b) we will use graphics shader technologies to provide real-time photorealistic visualisations of real surface textures / this will provide both rich stimuli for the observers and full control over the psychophysical experiments.We believe that this work is of international significance because it tackles the important scientific problem of providing repeatable methods for obtaining perceptually meaningful measures of texture, and that with the collaboration of NPL and CIE it will establish the basis for national and international standards for texture measurement.