Disney Is Building Facial Recognition to Figure Out When You'll Laugh During Toy Story 5

The Walt Disney Company is using AI to determine how much audiences enjoy every single moment of their films. At IEEE's Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition last weekend, Disney Research and Caltech explained their technique for tracking the facial expressions of people watching movies. The research team calls their new algorithm "factorized variational autoencoders" (FVAEs). They claim the technology is so effective at recognizing complex expressions that, after analyzing a single audience member's face for about ten minutes, it can even predict that face's future expressions throughout the remainder of a film. In order to build a dataset of millions of facial landmarks to feed into a neural network, researchers used infrared cameras to film the audiences of 150 showings of nine movies, including recent Disney films Star Wars: The Force Awaken, Zootopia, Inside Out, and Big Hero 6. The resulting AI system was then tested on other audiences.