Long-standing research has established that there six basic emotions that are universally recognized by humans - happiness, surprise, anger, sadness, disgust, and fear. The basic emotions don't vary in their expression, so we can accurately train computer algorithms to recognise them using computer vision and machine learning techniques.

The computer is fed a series of training instances – sets of images representing each emotion. Using these data sets, the computer learns to associate the image with the emotion label, and is thus able to assign these labels to unseen data - images it hasn't encountered before, such as new recordings of people watching video content. 

How it works is viewers responses are recorded through their webcams with their consent while they are watching video content. These are streamed to our cloud servers, where they're securely processed - low quality recordings are filtered out, facial expressions are analysed using our algorithms, and the results are aggregated and reported on our online dashboard in near-real time.

To see a simplified version of emotion tracking technology in action, download our Emotion Booth App here.

For full details on the ins-and-outs of the science behind our technology, download our whitepaper here.