Patent ID: 8462996

Claim:
A method for determining a person's emotional response to a visual stimulus, based on the person's facial expressions, comprising the following steps of: a) detecting and tracking a face from input images of the person captured by at least a means for capturing images, and localizing the face and facial features, b) deriving emotion-sensitive feature filters by generating emotion-sensitive candidate filters and determining the emotion-sensitive feature filters by choosing the filters that yield high responses to a predefined number of facial images from the emotion-sensitive candidate filters, c) extracting emotion-sensitive features from the face by applying the emotion-sensitive feature filters to localized facial features and transient features, d) determining facial muscle actions of the face based on the emotion-sensitive features, e) calculating likelihoods of expressions belonging to each of emotional categories using the facial muscle actions, f) finding the changes in affective state, called an emotion trajectory, of the person based on the facial muscle actions, and g) determining the response of the person to the visual stimulus, by analyzing the emotion trajectory, wherein the likelihoods determine the coordinates of instances of emotion in affect space, and wherein a series of estimations for the coordinates generates the emotion trajectory in the affect space.