Face-Based Glyphs Revisited

Abstract

While face-based glyphs have known advantages for certain visualization tasks, they suffer from mixing two rather different visual properties of faces: individual traits and emotion expressions. This paper proposes a set of actions on stylized face glyphs that are compatible with psychological evidence embodied in the facial action coding system [EFH02]. It shows how this set can be employed for distinguishing emotion expressions from other facial expressions, and derives an emotion-based glyph space to exploit the pre-attentive processing of emotion expressions. Finally, we report the results of an empirical user study comparing Chernoff-like glyphs with our emotion glyphs in a typical visualization task.