This paper provides an algorithm for partitioning grayscale images into disjoint regions of coherent

brightness and texture. Natural images contain both textured and untextured regions, so the cues of contour and

texture differences are exploited simultaneously. Contours are treated in the intervening contour fr a mework, while

texture is analyzed using textons. Each of these cues has a domain of applicability, so to facilitate cue combination we

introduce a gating operator based on the texturedness of the neighborhood at a pixel. Having obtained a local measure

of how likely two nearby pixels are to belong to the same region, we use the spectral graph theoretic fr a mework of

normalized cuts to find partitions of the image into regions of coherent texture and brightness. Experimental results

on a wide range of images are shown.