The role of eyebrows in face recognition [pdf]

I have only one eye, one that does not even work very well. However, in a lecture theatre I can recognise students in the back row and even know when they are making eye contact with me. Considering the poverty of information that my brain is working with that's pretty amazing.

<i>&gt; We report experimental results which suggest that for face recognition the eyebrows may be at least as influential as the eyes. Specifically, we find that the absence of eyebrows in familiar faces leads to a very large and significant disruption in recognition performance. In fact, a significantly greater decrement in face recognition is observed in the absence of eyebrows than in the absence of eyes.</i>

A while back I did a saliency map by moving a square pixel all across a face image &amp; comparing the embedding to the orginal image. Turns out it is just the T shape of our face that had the largest impact. Not the cheeks or forehead.