Impact of local luminance contrast on facial skin lightness perception: A psychophysical reverse correlation study using sub-band contrast modulation noise

In conventional psychophysical reverse correlation methods using white or pink noise, the luminance noise is added to every pixel. Thus, the image features correlated with perception are often biased toward local mean luminance. Furthermore, spatial frequencies and orientations are represented in the primary visual cortex, which forms the basis of various visual perception. In this study, we proposed a new reverse correlation method using noise that modulated the spatial frequency sub-band contrast and examined its properties in psychophysical experiments on facial skin lightness perception. In the experiment, we asked the observers to compare the perceived skin lightness in a paired comparison manner on face stimuli with increased or decreased spatial frequency sub-band contrasts at random spatial locations. The results showed that the contrasts in the eyes or irises were strongly and positively correlated with the perceived skin lightness in most sub-bands, demonstrating that the proposed method reiterated the findings of previous studies that the sparkle of the irises makes the skin appear lighter. Contrarily, the conventional reverse correlation method using pink noise images was applied to the skin lightness perception. The results indicated that only the local mean luminance in some skin regions, such as the forehead, was correlated with skin lightness perception. In summary, with the proposed method, we found some image features in the facial parts other than the skin mean luminance relevant to skin lightness perception, which are difficult to detect using the conventional method. They are considered complementary given that the proposed method and the conventional method extracted considerably different image features. It depends on the psychophysical tasks and stimuli which one is more appropriate.