face detection

What is a Video Search Engine? Part IV – Detecting Faces and Emotions

The ability to detect faces has been around for some time for real time CCTV systems. However, these systems remain out of reach for many as they are expensive and would need specialized implementation that would drive the cost up higher. Therefore, detecting faces from videos instead is a viable alternative because it instantly adds face detection ability to any CCTV system.

Detecting faces allows you to count, track movements by detecting unique faces. Face detection finds and tracks human faces within a video. Multiple faces can be detected and subsequently be tracked as they move around.

video search engine face detection

This will be useful to analyze human traffic within a mall, street or even a restaurant or café. It would be possible to identify and track movement of unique human faces. Therefore, it is possible to perform a headcount of human traffic within the video. 

Beyond detecting faces, it is more possible to detect emotions. Emotion Detection is an extension of the Face Detection video search that returns analysis on multiple emotional attributes from the faces detected, for example happiness, sadness, fear, anger, etc.

video search engine emotion detection

Recognizing the emotion of a person or crowd over time based allows us to track the emotional highs and lows within a particular time-frame. It also allows us to track someone’s emotions at a specific point of time. Answering questions like, how did the crowd react when the President makes a particular point? With emotion detection, it can be applicable to gauge audience responses in scenarios like:

  • Speeches
  • Focus groups
  • Group reactions
  • Interviews

Emotion detection can form a very good baseline for the scenarios above.

To find out more about how you can detect faces and emotions inside your videos, visit VideoSpace Video Search Engine or our Video-Search-as-a-Service.

What is a Video Search Engine?

Let's dissect this into 2 parts - "Video" and "Search Engine". 

Starting with "Search Engine" first. We are so used to using search engines today that we do not really bother with how a search engine really works. And perhaps you shouldn't... why should you as long as the results are good. We normally start questioning (or complain) when the results are not what we expect it to be. 

So a good search engine should do a couple of things. It should (let's get a bit technical) have:

  • A good Indexing engine
  • Phrase matching
  • Smart Search result Summary 
  • Keyword highlighting
  • Stemming/Lemmas (Word form variations are searched and ranked lower)
  • Complex expression support; nested groups, partial matching, NOT, OR and AND
  • Multiple Format indexing
  • Unicode and non English language support

It all the above these parameters are measurable, you will be able to figure out if one engine is better than another. 

So the format that we want to search is "Video". Today, typical search engines can only search "Title" and "Metadata". Even if both "title" and "metadata" are well defined and representative of the video itself, what is missing is the content. Imagine you have a thousand page document and you can only search the document title and it's summary. That's the current state of affairs for video search. 

So of course the next question is what do you want to search from a "Video"? That's like opening Paradox's Box. Unlike a piece of document, video is multi-dimensional and contains a lot more information. For example, speech, words, people, objects, movement, colours, etc. 

Currently, many of these search technologies still do not exist or are barely in their infancy. What is available now, is just scratching the tip of the iceberg. Therefore, the real definition of what is a video search engine is currently evolving. 

At VideoSpace, we would like to define our version of VIdeo Search Engine. Where our VIdeo Search Engine is able to search six key areas:

  • Speech Recognition
  • Words (or Text)
  • Motion Detection
  • Facial Detection
  • Emotion Detection
  • Offensive Content Detection

Numbers reports say the same thing. By 2017, videos will account for more than 70% of all internet traffic. Imagine you have the ability to search videos in future. 

The VideoSpace Video Search Engine is taking the leap now.