The human face provides a number of signals essential for interpersonal communication in our social life. It is our direct and naturally preeminent means of communicating and understanding someone’s affective state and intentions on the basis of the shown facial expression.

FaceReader is a revolutionary new tool, capable of analyzing facial signals. By measuring the facial expression of a person, this new product gives you an objective indication of this person’s emotion.


FaceReader is the first system to automatically recognize specific properties in facial images, including the following emotional expressions:

• happy
• sad
• angry
• surprised
• scared
• disgusted
• 'neutral' state

Emotions are represented as bar graphs and as a continuous signal. An additional gauge display summarizes how negative or positive the emotion is.


Save time and resources
You will be able to quickly detect interesting episodes in a long series of events. FaceReader will save you valuable time and resources: instead of you spending time annotating facial expressions, the computer does the work.

Increase accuracy, reliability, and objectivity
Using FaceReader for analysis of facial expressions increases accuracy and reliability in your observations. It also helps you to improve the objectivity of user experience evaluation.


This new tool can be used in a wide range of research applications, for example in:

• Psychology: how do people respond to stimuli, e.g. in fear research?
• Education: observing students’ facial expressions can support the development of educational tools.
• Human-computer interaction: facial signals can provide valuable information about the user experience.
• Usability testing: emotional expressions can indicate the ease of use and efficiency of user interfaces.
• Market research: how do people respond to a new commercial?
• Consumer behavior: how do participants in a sensory panel react?

Additional features
In addition to analyzing expressions, FaceReader can also classify faces on the following properties:

• gender
• age
• ethnicity
• facial hair (beard and/or moustache)
• the wearing of glasses

Also, FaceReader includes a basic person recognition algorithm. Hereby, individual persons can be recognized after the input of the original facial image once before. You can use FaceReader for analysis of media files or still images. FaceReader can also analyze live: all it takes is a good quality webcam.