FTM: The Face Truth Machine—Hand-crafted features from micro-expressions to support lie detection

This work deals with the delicate task of lie detection from facial dynamics. The proposed Face Truth Machine (FTM) is an intelligent system able to support a human operator without any special equipment. It can be embedded in the present infrastructures for forensic investigation or whenever it is required to assess the trustworthiness of responses during an interview. Due to its flexibility and its non-invasiveness, it can overcome some limitations of present solutions. Of course, privacy issues may arise from the use of such systems, as often underlined nowadays. However, it is up to the utilizer to take these into account and make fair use of tools of this kind. The paper will discuss particular aspects of the dynamic analysis of face landmarks to detect lies. In particular, it will delve into the behavior of the features used for detection and how these influence the system’s final decision. The novel detection system underlying the Face Truth Machine is able to analyze the subject’s expressions in a wide range of poses. The results of the experiments presented testify to the potential of the proposed approach and also highlight the very good results obtained in cross-dataset testing, which usually represents a challenge for other approaches. • The paper presents an approach to lie detection based on face micro-expressions. • The method uses hand-crafted features to spot events suggested by psychological investigations. • Thresholds on facial micro-expressions support detecting the occurrence of relevant events. • The transfer of parameters across datasets achieved satisfying results. • The contribution of single facial features is analyzed via decidability indices.