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Comment by reginaldo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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...

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 ;-)

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