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Comment by zemaj | Hacker News Reader

Wow, reading someone's heart rate from a video.

Imagine that plugged into Google Glass. Overlay someone's heart rate next to their face while you're talking to them!

Excuse me while I book a trip to Vegas.

I was thinking about the implications of using this technique to analyze e.g. political speeches and try to catch people lying on the act. Your application (winning on card games) seems very interesting too.

Coincidentally so was I! With a person's microgestures amplified, you'd at least notice inherent changes in a person's physical behavior. Now, we need to remember that lying isn't as simple as "he's looking down and to the right" because that can just be a personality trait of the person.

With public figures, however, if you collect enough video of various activities, you could determine a baseline physical demeanor. Then, if the figure in question radically steps out of that baseline, you can send off red flags.

Ideally, this could be used to analyze facial dynamics to help determine focus, expression (for example, the SOEmote video that was recently posted), mood (though we now get back into personality traits), or, as the video showed, subtle changes in the physical body.

I was under the impression that micro-expressions (I assume you're referring to them) were very short in duration rather than in magnitude. So this would be the wrong kind of amplification.

micro-expressions .. were very short in duration rather than in magnitude. So this would be the wrong kind of amplification

This is exactly the kind of amplification you need. Something like the movement caused by mirror of an SLR camera (at the end of their demo) is very very short in duration, but they amplify the magnitude AND slow the video to allow it to be visible.

No, my point is that micro-expressions don't need to be amplified, because they are perfectly large in magnitude, just very short. So all you need is a freeze-frame.

Some amplification is still needed in my opinion, but you are correct. Amplifying the video of a high speed camera should aid in the some of the expression detection. Instead of something like eye movement, think something more subtle, like a person's brow being furrowed.

It seems like this technology can be used on historical videos. It'd be interesting to see the heart rates from past speeches where we know they lied, to see if there is a good correlation.

That is an awesome idea.

I imagine the drug atenolol would become popular among politicians.

That, or the radio address will once again become immensely popular.

Until realize that even though the filters in this post have been applied to videos. It will be just as easy to apply the filters to audio, surely again resulting in a revealed heartbeat :)

A lot of the sample videos have very high frame rate, so it might not work on historical video.

What about using this on a crowd of people? You could get an idea of what impact your particular statements are having on them.

It could be interesting to look over old films of riots to see how they may have been instigated...

> analyze e.g. political speeches and try to catch people lying on the act.

Politicians in front of cameras are too heavily covered in face powder for their real color to shine through.

And if that doesn't work, special makeup will be invented that does do the job.

Of course, use of those techniques will themselves come to indicate guilt...

Kind of like paranoid internet users setting up TOR implies their guilt as well.

I wouldn't make assumptions. There's a valid point in wanting to defend your thoughts and intentions.

The technology to do that face to face might already exist: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2727960.

The technology is probably not mature enough for video analysis, though.

> analyze e.g. political speeches and try to catch people lying on the act

Does it work on cold-blooded animals too?

I see a bigger problem: to calibrate the data you would first need to find a politician who is not lying during a speech. Good luck with that ;-)

Something tells me Casinos aren't going to let you wear Google glass... :)

Just like you aren't allowed to keep your phone on the table.

Imagine when everyone is an amateur polygraphist ... some conversations are going to become unnecessarily fraught.

The use I thought of was figuring out when your date was trying to perk up the courage to kiss you.

And personally, I don't think any of the "modern-day lies" that people tell would cause any kind of increase in heart rate.

and then it turns out your date was extremely uncomfortable and stressed out, trying to think of ways to get away.

it is not as simple as you wish. and that is good!

How about amplifying micro-motor motions in the eyes or something like that?

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