Powering Human Insight

Affectiva SDK

Incorporate Real-Time Emotion Sensing In Digital Experiences and Applications

Documentation

*Free 2-week trial with no obligations.

Develop Emotion Sensing Solutions with Affectiva SDK

Affectiva SDK is the industry-leading solution for real-time facial expression analysis, enabling businesses, researchers, and developers to decode human emotions with precision. Leveraging deep learning models trained on thousands of diverse participants, Affectiva SDK provides highly accurate emotion detection, outperforming competitors in real-world conditions.

Whether you’re conducting ad testing, user experience research, driver monitoring, or healthcare studies, Affectiva SDK delivers scalable, cross-platform Facial Coding AI that integrates seamlessly into your workflow.

Comprehensive Data Set

19M

Faces

10B

Facial Frames

90

Countries Represented

What it can do

Facial Expression Analysis from any video source

Embed into your own application

Detect and analyze multiple faces simultaneously

Speaker detection for video conferences

Real-time and post-processing options

Mobile Supported with native Android SDK

Why Choose The Affectiva SDK Over Competitors?

🔹 Comprehensive Emotion and Mood Detection – Recognizes 7 basic emotions plus two additional states: sentimentality and confusion, making it ideal for advertising, gaming, and market research. Our models are optimized for high accuracy and designed to accommodate a wide variety of user environments.

🔹 NEW! Android SDK – Affectiva SDK now supports Android natively and brings the 5.x model to Android. This opens up for a wide range of new applications and enables full privacy and zero server bills as all compute happens at edge on the users device.

🔹 NEW! Pain and Yawn metrics – The Pain metric detects distinct, objective facial expressions of pain/discomfort, which can be used to explore “cringe” and “hard-to-watch” moments in dramatic or provocative content. The Yawn metric provides real-time tracking of 29 facial signals to isolate jaw and mouth movements, ideal for detecting fatigue, boredom, or drops in attention.

🔹 Advanced Facial Action Unit (AU) Detection – Tracks 20+ AUs based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), ensuring a nuanced understanding of facial expressions beyond simple emotions.

🔹 Superior Accuracy in Real-World Conditions – Trained on a large-scale, naturalistic dataset, Affectiva SDK outperforms state-of-the-art competitors in challenging conditions, including diverse demographics, lighting, and occlusions.

🔹 Real-Time Processing on Multiple Faces – Optimized for high-speed, real-time analysis, supporting multi-face tracking for dynamic group interactions.

🔹 Seamless Integration Across Platforms – Available for Android, Windows and Linux, Affectiva SDK easily integrates into research, business intelligence, and AI applications. WASM support coming soon.

🔹 Proven Impact in Market Research & UX Testing – Used by global brands and research teams to measure audience engagement, emotional responses, and attention levels, driving data-driven decisions. Mentioned in 7k+ academic articles and papers.

🔹 Runs locally so no need for internet connectivity or specialized hardware. The Affectiva SDK is optimized to run on even modest hardware, with zero latency or network dependency.

Who Uses Affectiva SDK?

Marketing and Advertising

Optimize ad engagement, emotional impact, and brand perception with emotion- driven insights.

User Experience & HCI Research

Enhance digital experiences by understanding user frustration, satisfaction, and engagement.

Automotive & Driver Monitoring

Detect driver drowsiness, distraction, and emotional states for safer road experiences.

Healthcare & Mental Health Applications

Support patient diagnostics, therapy monitoring, and psychological research with facial expression analysis.

Academic & AI Research

Train machine learning models with robust facial expression datasets, improving AI-human interaction capabilities.

Get Started with Affectiva SDK

Ready to integrate real-time facial expression analysis into your projects? Contact iMotions today to discuss licensing options, integration support, and custom solutions tailored to your needs.

Documentation

Science Ressources

Technical Requirements and License Options

Platform support

Android

WASM (Web Assembly)

Windows 10 (x86) with Visual Studio 2019

Ubuntu 24.04lts x86_64 with GCC 13.2

Hardware

There are no special requirements for processing power or a GPU,

A RGB video source (minimum 640×480 resolution).

Licenses

Commercial and development license adapted to your use case.

Academic license with attractive pricing for annual renewals.

Please contact us for a free evaluation trial.

Related Solutions

Affectiva Facial Coding API

Looking to batch process videos? Then the Facial Coding API is a cost effective and easy solution where you only pay for the minutes you use.

More about the Affectiva Facial Coding API

Affectiva Media Analytics

Optimize content and media spend by measuring consumer emotional responses to videos, ads, movies and TV shows – unobtrusively and at scale.

Learn More

iMotions Lab

Combine Facial Expression Analysis with eye tracking, EEG or EDA for multimodal human behavior research.

Learn More

Affectiva Facial Coding AI in academic research

Affectiva’s facial coding AI is widely used in academic research, and is regarded as the gold standard for automated facial coding.

See all publications

Explore AI-driven Emotion Recognition