Emotion recognition solutions
The market for emotion detection software is booming. There are dozens of solutions, ranging from very accurate to nearly useless. We’ll take a look at the three most frequently used.
Microsoft Azure provides a Face API for processing real-time and prerecorded images and videos. Face API has several major applications:
- Face detection — Detects a face in an image or video as well as a person’s approximate age, gender, and emotion
- Face verification — Compares two faces and analyzes if they belong to the same person (useful for security checks)
- Search for similar faces — Analyzes a face, compares it to a database of faces, and detects similar features
- Face grouping — Groups people based on universal traits: age, gender, expression, facial features, etc.
- Identifying people — Compares a face to previously scanned faces and identifies a person if their face is matched with a verified identity
Amazon Rekognition is an AWS emotion recognition API. It analyzes real-time and prerecorded images and videos. This API detects objects and activities, recognizes handwritten text, counts people and objects in the frame, and monitors for unsafe content. It has three applications:
- Face recognition — Detects a face and identifies a person by comparing the analyzed face to a database of previously identified faces
- Celebrity recognition — Compares a detected face to a database of celebrities
- Face analysis — Analyzes key attributes of a face: gender, approximate age, emotions, glasses, hair, facial features
Vision AI is a computer vision platform from Google. It consists of two products:
- AutoML Vision — A tool for automating training of custom ML models
- Vision API — A tool for detecting and classifying objects, recognizing handwritten text, identifying popular places and brands, marking explicit content, etc. Regarding emotion recognition, Vision API detects faces in images and detects emotions. But unlike other solutions, it doesn’t identify people or recognizes age or gender.
Affectiva is a company that specializes in developing human perception AI. It has four products for emotion recognition:
- Emotion SDK — Analyzes facial expressions in real-time videos from a device’s camera to detect seven basic emotions and recognize age, gender, and ethnicity
- Automotive AI — Analyzes facial and vocal expressions of drivers and passengers in order to ensure a safe ride
- Affdex — A cloud-based solution that detects customers’ reactions to new products (designed specifically for market research)
- iMotions — Сombines data from visual emotion monitoring with biometric data such as heartbeat, brain activity, and eye movement (designed for scientists and researchers)
Emotion recognition is a popular and promising sphere that has a chance to simplify a lot of things, from marketing studies to health monitoring. It can also be useful for generative AI development and similar types of projects.
Developing facial emotion recognition software requires both deep knowledge of human psychology and deep expertise in AI development. While the first provides us with an understanding of what facial expressions indicate what emotions, AI still has much to learn in order to recognize them correctly.
Read the full article at the Apriorit blog to explore more about emotion recognition in images and video.
