Reseachers using face temperature to test for lying
The Center for Human Reliability Studies, which is part of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, has tested a technique called infrared thermography on 40 volunteers so far.
While the volunteers were answering questions, an infrared camera took pictures of their faces. The temperature on and around the nose was the most responsive.
“The polygraph has been around for like 67 years and is the culmination of developments (and) research over that time,” project coordinator Don Watkins said. “We’ve achieved similar results to the polygraph in two or three years.”
The U.S. intelligence community is funding the project, but center director Jerry Eisele wouldn’t elaborate.
“We believe this technology that we have evaluated clearly has some excellent utility,” he told The Knoxville News Sentinel.
The center also worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, two polygraph specialists, a plastic surgeon and a psychologist.
The polygraph relies on equipment to monitor blood pressure, pulse, respiration and galvanic skin response while a subject answers questions.
Infrared thermography also monitors physiological changes that may signal a person is lying, but the technique doesn’t require the person to wear wires or cuffs, which could add to the person’s stress level and affect the results.
Researchers believe skin temperature will drop when people are lying because blood capillaries restrict when a person’s nervous system is responding to deception.
“The heat from the core of your body cannot get to the skin as fast as it normally will, so your skin should cool when you start to tell a lie,” said Ralph Dinwiddie, a senior research scientist at ORNL’s High Temperature Materials Laboratory.
In the thermal images of the face, the areas of most significant temperature change are shown in red. The more stable areas are white or lighter in color.
Researchers conducted fake interrogations to test infrared thermography. The volunteers took an object from a crime scene and were supposed to lie about what object they had.
During questioning, an infrared camera took 10 or more pictures a second, which showed slight changes in temperature on the person’s face.
Researchers were able to correctly identify the item in a subject’s possession in about four out of five cases. In about 40 percent of the cases, the evidence was very strong.
The Oak Ridge center has submitted proposals to federal agencies to conduct follow-up research and develop the necessary software and data-analysis systems.
With sufficient funding, a prototype system could be available within about two years, Watkins said.
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