Influence of the Interest Operators in the Detection of Spontaneous Reactions to the Sound

Hearing plays a key role in our social participation and daily activities. In health, hearing loss in one of the most common conditions, so its diagnosis and monitoring is highly important. The standard test for the evaluation of hearing is the pure tone audiometry, which is a behavioral test that requires a proper interaction and communication between the patient and the audiologist. This need of understanding is which makes this test unworkable when dealing with patients with severe cognitive decline or other communication disorders. In these particular cases, the audiologist base the evaluation in the detection of spontaneous facial reaction that may indicate auditory perception. With the aim of supporting the audiologist, a screening method that analyzes video sequences and seeks for eye gestural reactions was proposed. In this paper, a comprehensive survey about one of the crucial steps of the methodology is presented. This survey determines the optimal configuration for all of them, and evaluates in detail their combination with different classification techniques. The obtained results provide a global vision of the suitability of the different interest operators.