Modeling and synthesis of tactile texture with spatial spectrograms for display on variable friction surfaces

Texture modeling strives to encapsulate the important properties of texture in a concise representation for interpretation, storage, and rendering. Models for tactile texture have yet to describe a representation that is both perceptually complete and sufficiently compact. In this work, we take inspiration from models of visual and auditory texture and propose a spatial spectrogram representation of tactile texture that separates localized features from textural aspects using a windowed Fourier decomposition. We investigate the length scales at which humans can perceive localized features, and represent textures as spectrograms that capture those local features. Additionally, we demonstrate a reconstruction algorithm capable of recreating texture from a spectrogram representation with no perceptual consequence.