Using machine learning, Microsoft's Project Oxford can scan your photos and tell how happy or angry you are, according to Fortune. The new tool was shown by head of Microsoft Research Cambridge in the United Kingdom Chris Bishop during a keynote talk at Future Decoded.

Emotional qualities such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, contempt, surprise and neutral - which are called the eight core emotional states - can be detected from the facial features in a photo. This tool aims to help developers create smarter applications that will be more beneficial to the users.

According to Microsoft's Technology and Research group Ryan Galgon "developers might want to use these tools to create systems that marketers can use to gauge people's reaction to a store display, movie or food. Or, they might find them valuable for creating a consumer tool, such as a messaging app, that offers up different options based on what emotion it recognizes in a photo."

Most importantly, with a tool like this it will be easier for developers to create apps that will help law enforcement or intelligence agencies in detecting questionable or suspicious behaviour. This will be a big help in criminal investigations or even in fights against terrorism.

Project Oxford is a Microsoft project that makes use of machine learning, better known as artificial intelligence, to help developers create apps. According to TechCrunch, it first released free machine-learning APIs that could integrate face detection, speech recognition and age recognition in April of this year. The latter even became viral as a lot of people tried these apps that you just had to show your picture to and they could tell your age.

Now, the technology went even further as it can now detect a person's emotions from a photo. Since its release last April it has drawn the interest of various organisations, from start-ups to huge corporations.