Image a system that can, in a blink of an eye, scan a person and determine any emotion. Not only does the system recognise the person, it can look up more information in real-time. Such system have application in airport security for example. While recognising a person may be one thing but determining hidden emotions of people, even detect lies, is much harder problem. It is this problem that New Technology 2014 Student, Anna Louise Ásgeirsdóttir explores. This is from the abstract:
“A general, yet perhaps a novel approach on how technology could be used to recognise facial micro expressions, how they can be identified and why that is beneficial.
Micro expressions are involuntary movements in facial muscles revealing strongly felt emotions, and can be a great clue of what people are feeling. By automatically scanning, for example in security surveillance systems in airports, for some basic emotions such as anger or fear, a flag can be raised for people who show these emotions to be taken aside for a further check.
Not only can we have the system scan for hidden emotions, but to see if the faces passing by have a connection to a face in the systems database, which contains mug shots of people with outstanding warrants, terrorists and people reported missing. Both of these features could possibly foresee criminal intent, and possibly prevent crimes and terrorism.
For over twenty years facial recognition and automatic facial expression analysis has been an active area of research – it is about time this yields some practical results.”
The paper can be found here: Technological innovation of Psychology (PDF)