Observer models utilizing compressed textures

We have previously presented a method for sorting textures based on whether they obscure a signal, and thus hinder the ability of an observer to perform a signal-detection task, or whether the presence of certain textures can be easily ignored by the observer, and thus do little to impede performance. This analysis has led to a surrogate figure of merit that was demonstrated to correlate with human-observer performance as measured by the channelized Hotelling observer. In this work, we generalize our previous results to include more tasks including estimation and combined detection/estimation tasks. We demonstrate the ability of this method to determine the textures present in a set of images that are the most detrimental to the specified task. We further devise alternative surrogate figures of merit can utilize this texture-compression method as a mechanism for generating channels for observer-performance computations.