The patent covers the platform’s ability to collect and process visual attention data on content and advertising across all digital screens, including mobile, desktop and connected television, as well as infra-red and webcam eye tracking technologies.

The patent covers Lumen’s ability to collect data on a webpage’s advertising and content, estimate a user’s gaze point within the display, and transform a geometry of the estimated gaze point and/or a geometry of the browser window to a common coordinate system.

Identifying, extracting and storing an object in the browser window that corresponds to the estimated gaze point is also covered by the US patent.

The US patent adds to other Lumen patents for the platform that cover Europe and the rest of the world.

Lumen’s eye-tracking data collection platform has captured visual attention information from more than 800,000 real-world sessions from opt-in panels of consumers across 37 countries, with the data used to train the Lumen Predictive Attention Model.

Mike Follett, chief executive and co-founder at Lumen, said: “Today’s patent announcement shows our commitment to investing in our technology for the benefit of the ad industry.

“Advertisers trust Lumen’s pre-bid and post-bid predictions because they are based on human attention data that is reliable and robust. Better data builds better models that deliver better results.”

Dr Navid Hajmirza, Lumen co-founder and head of research and development and AI, said: “We are immensely proud to have our innovative data collection technology recognised with a US patent.

“Our technology marks a significant advancement in how advertisers measure and optimise visual attention across both mobile and desktop, without the need for hardware.”