Beyond the human eye: Review of quantitative methods for evaluating facade visual perception

Urban facades attract significant public and private investment, yet evaluating their appearance remains methodologically challenging because perceptual judgments combine both subjective and objective factors. This systematic review aims to consolidate quantitative approaches to facade perception by mapping them to the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S–O–R) framework, clarifying how specific physical features–such as fractal complexity and color palettes–can be measured alongside human cognitive and behavioral data. This review adheres to the reproducible PRISMA protocol, augmented by co-citation expansion with a search conducted across Web of Science, Scopus, and CrossRef databases. Studies were included if they used quantitative methods to evaluate facade perception in urban environments and were published between the years 1990 and 2025. A collection of 75 articles was selected. This review clusters each study by its S–O–R stage of their metric, reveals the common reliance on static images, lack of validation across cultural contexts, and insufficiency of research with integration of multiple stages measurements. To the authors’ best knowledge, this synthesis is the first systematic review in this field that focuses on facades, and it synthesized a diverse literature into a classification and comparison of current methods, providing a solid foundation for future early-stage practice integration. Key limitations across the field include the overall opacity of data and models, as well as limited cross-cultural validation. • First holistic review synthesis of facade visual-perception data-driven studies. • Novel PRISMA-guided and S–O–R-integrated review framework for perception research. • Enriching methodological frameworks to address the lack of cross-cultural validation.