Perception of Human Age from Faces: Symmetric Versus Asymmetric Movement
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Materials and Methods for the Age Perception Experiment
2.1. Participants
2.2. Stimuli
2.3. Procedures
3. Results
4. Discussion
Author Contributions
Funding
Conflicts of Interest
Appendix A. Image and Dynamic Stimuli Creation
A.1. Initial Image Manipulations
- For each face image, the position was normalized so that the vertical axis, which roughly defines facial symmetry (the center line of the face from the middle of both eyes to the chin through the nose tip), was a vertical (Image A; see Figure A1a). During the stimuli creations, all the images were processed in 512 × 512 pixels.
- A mirror reversed image of each image of Image A was created. (Image B; Figure A1b)
- In Image A and B, facial features such as eye, mouth, nose, and so on, were landmarked (using FUTON system (ATR Promotions Inc.) [20,21]), and were morphed to be 50% of each other. (Image S; Figure A1c). This manipulation makes the face area appear perfectly symmetric. The system can be used by selecting the area to be morphed by target features; all other areas other than the facial parts (such as hairstyles) were maintained as indicated in Image A. The XY coordinates on the image of the landmarks, such as “right lip corner” and “top of the nose,” were all saved and used in the subsequent movie making step.
- Note that the face model shown in this article was recorded in the same situation as the ones used in experiment 1; however, they are not from JAFFE [22] nor have we used the same faces in our experiments. All rights reserved by POLA Chemical Industries Inc.
A.2. Creating Dynamic Faces of Symmetry and Asymmetries
A.2.1. Preliminary Test for Threshold of Perceiving Asymmetry
A.2.2. Dynamic Stimuli Creation for the Age Perception Experiment
- Using Photoshop CS 5 (Adobe Inc.), right and left asymmetric images were created by combining left and right halves of images with different rates of change for each model. The left or right asymmetric images were combined with the left-right symmetric images. However, the images, at this time, were clearly unnatural since the contours and transitions on the left and right were sometimes visible. Therefore, for each stimulus, all images were low-pass filtered (each pixel was averaged in 21 × 21 pixel size which was approximately 7.8% of visible face width, 272 pixel).
- Facial areas were cut into ellipse shapes so that the areas unrelated to the face perception could be invisible. The ellipse size was 272 pixels horizontally and 350 pixels vertically. The center of the ellipse was set as the mid-point of each image.
- All the 30 facial images, including 26 changing from neutral to smiling or pronouncing “i” and some 100% images, were presented in a continuum of 30 fps, and the presentation time of one video clip was 1000 ms in total.
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Kamachi, M.G.; Chiba, T.; Kurosumi, M.; Mizukoshi, K. Perception of Human Age from Faces: Symmetric Versus Asymmetric Movement. Symmetry 2019, 11, 650. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym11050650
Kamachi MG, Chiba T, Kurosumi M, Mizukoshi K. Perception of Human Age from Faces: Symmetric Versus Asymmetric Movement. Symmetry. 2019; 11(5):650. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym11050650
Chicago/Turabian StyleKamachi, Miyuki G., Tsukasa Chiba, Motonori Kurosumi, and Koji Mizukoshi. 2019. "Perception of Human Age from Faces: Symmetric Versus Asymmetric Movement" Symmetry 11, no. 5: 650. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym11050650