It's called a "Gabor patch", and it's constructed by multiplying a 1D sine wave by a 2D gaussian window (it's the sine wave that's reminding you of the basis functions of the 2D DCT).
You'll see these all over the place if you read studies about vision. The (highly oversimplified) reason is that if you imagine the edge-detection processes of a mammalian brain as a set of filters, the impulse response of one of those filters would be a Gabor patch.
This is related to why the DCT is so effective for vision applications, although perhaps less significantly than you might imagine just by looking at the patterns.
You'll see these all over the place if you read studies about vision. The (highly oversimplified) reason is that if you imagine the edge-detection processes of a mammalian brain as a set of filters, the impulse response of one of those filters would be a Gabor patch.
This is related to why the DCT is so effective for vision applications, although perhaps less significantly than you might imagine just by looking at the patterns.