Facial Skin Surface Temperature Changes During a “Concealed Information” Test

Abstract

When individuals who commit a crime are questioned, they often show involuntary physiological responses to remembered details of that crime. This phenomenon is the basis for the concealed information test, in which rarely occurring crime-related details are embedded in a series of more frequently occurring crime-irrelevant items while respiratory, cardiovascular, and electrodermal responses are recorded. Two experiments were completed to investigate the feasibility of using facial skin surface temperature (SST) measures recorded using high definition thermographic images as the physiological measure during a concealed information test. Participants were randomly assigned to nondeceptive or deceptive groups. Deceptive participants completed a mock-crime paradigm. A focal plane array thermal imaging radiometer was used to monitor SST while crime-relevant and crime-irrelevant items were verbally presented to each participant. During both experiments, there were significant facial SST differences between deceptive and nondeceptive participants early in the analysis interval. In the second experiment, hemifacial (i.e., "half-face" divided along the longitudinal axis) effects were combined with the bilateral responses to correctly classify 91.7% of participants. These results suggest that thermal image analysis can be effective in discriminating deceptive and nondeceptive individuals during a concealed information test.

Nose Detection and Breathing Monitoring in Thermal Images

“…In lie detection, facial surface temperature can be used as a dependent value [5][6][7]. Liars tend to be anxious over being caught, and lie detectors measure physiological reactions arising from such anxiety.…”

“…Stimuli directly related to the lie produces arousal in liars, and there are some lie detectors that measure physiological reactions associated with arousal. Anxiety affects temperature in areas around the eyes and the forehead [8], and arousal also changes temperature near the eyes [6].…”

Capturing Driver Response to In-Vehicle Human-Machine Interface Technologies Using Facial Thermography

“…The effect of stress caused by deception in polygraph-like settings has been investigated by Pavlidis et al (Pavlidis, Eberhardt, & Levine, 2002;Pollina et al, 2006;Tsiamyrtzis et al, 2007). Skin temperature just under the lower eye lid measured via infrared thermography was sensitive to whether the participants were deceptive or not, and the changes in temperature occurred within about one second (Pollina et al, 2006).…”

“…Skin temperature just under the lower eye lid measured via infrared thermography was sensitive to whether the participants were deceptive or not, and the changes in temperature occurred within about one second (Pollina et al, 2006). More recently, filtering the temperature signal from the periorbital region of the inner eye (see Figure 1) allowed for 87% of the 39 participants to be correctly classified as deceptive or non-deceptive (Tsiamyrtzis et al, 2007).…”

Preparation to Experimental Testing of the Potential from Using Facial Temperature Changes Registered with an Infrared Camera in Lie Detection

“…Th e solution of the problem required writing a new piece of software that would make it possible to capture and record data from an infrared camera, and especially to present the temperature of the observed points in a graphic form along the time axis, simultaneously make it possible to denote on the graph the moment when the subject is exposed to a stimulus (test question). Moreover, the software must be constructed so as to allow continuous tracing of temperature changes in the previously selected points on the subject's face that are most diagnostic according to literature (see: Pollina et al 2004;Pollina et al 2006;Jain et al 2012;Rajoub, Zwiggelaar 2014), and to do so, despite the movements of the subject's head and facial muscles. Application c ode was written in Matlab (2014 b) environment, which supports the FLIR (A655sc) infrared camera standard.…”