Road lighting for pedestrians: comparing full-face and 3/4 views in a facial emotion recognition task

Road lighting should support the needs of pedestrians to make interpersonal evaluations after dark, for example, whether it feels safe to walk towards the person ahead or if avoiding action should be taken. In previous studies this has been investigated using a facial emotion recognition (FER) task, but using only full-face views of the person ahead. Other views are possible and this might affect the ability to make FER judgements and thus the impact of changes in light level. Reported here are the results of an experiment investigating FER with full-face and 3/4 views. The results show that while correct expression recognition is reduced with the 3/4 view, there is no interaction between face luminance and face view.