facial recognition system tracks your reactions to movies

understanding how spectators react to movies is disney’s latest experiment. in collaboration with caltech, and presented at IEEE’s computer vision and pattern recognition conference in hawaii, this new research shows how a facial recognition system will aid movie makers to understand the different emotions and reactions generated by films in the audience. the software simply monitors the viewer’s facial expressions through a method called factorized variational auto encoders, or FVAE.

the software monitors the viewer’s facial expressions through a method called factorized variational auto encoders (FVAE)

the facial recognition system was tested by disney research using infrared hi-def cameras that capture people’s faces while watching movies like ‘big hero 6’, ‘the jungle book’ and ‘star wars: the force awakens’. the results showcased 16 million facial landmarks from 3,179 viewers demonstrating a ‘very strong predictive performance’. to do so, the AI software takes the faces of people and understands how many of them are laughing, how wide are their eyes, and the different expressions they make.

the software is able to read your face and understand if you’re laughing, amazed or simply bored

‘with enough information, the system can assess how an audience is reacting to a movie so accurately that it can predict an individual’s responses based on just a few minutes of observation,’ commented peter carr, a disney research scientist.

 
the AI will learn as it’s being used, resulting in more accurate results the more it’s employeed

‘understanding human behavior is fundamental to developing AI systems that exhibit greater behavioral and social intelligence. for example, developing AI systems to assist in monitoring and caring for the elderly relies on being able to pick up cues from their body language. after all, people don’t always explicitly say that they are unhappy or have some problem.’ says yisong yue from caltech.