Alastair Gordon of Gordon & McCallum presented at ESOMAR 3D 2011 on facial recognition, a basic human skill that helps us understand one another’s emotional states.
Research has a problem measuring the subtleties, especially for emotions. Facial recognition is one approach to assist with this:
- Our faces reveal our emotions
- Facial imaging measures it
- Quickly assess reaction to media
- No questions – easy to integrate and interpret
Faces are universal expressions of emotion across culture and have been manually coded by researchers in the past. The Swiss company nVisio has developed an automated way of recognizing faces through webcams and doesn’t require any physical sensors or proprietary hardware. The system works with poor lighting, out-of-focus cameras and motion blur.
For the participant, the research process doesn’t require any questions to be answered: they just need to look at an image or watch a video. Facial expressions in reaction to a stimulus happen something very quickly (500 milliseconds) as the stimulus changes. Facial recognition provides with minimal respondent effort a large amount of data over the timeline of exposure to commercials or other videos.
Facial recognition produces a better understanding of emotions, which are so important for driving consumer engagement and purchase.
Author Notes:
Jeffrey Henning
