Analysis of saliency of facial features through psychophysical scaling

Abstract

Sixteen side-view faces having two defining properties of the left eye and a mouth which were drawn by arcs with varying curvatures were rank ordered by 24 university students according to their perceived intensity of smiling. ... the data are approximately described by an inverse logistic function of a physical measure defined as a weighted sum of eye and mouth curvatures, ... the eye us 1.39 times as important as mouth in perceiving the intensity of smiling faces. Comparison between the relative importance of eye to mouth estimated from this analysis and from the preceeding work on front-view smiling faces suggests that the right and left eye are "integrally" combined to contribute to the overall perceived intensity of smiling faces.