Coming soon, a computer that can spot faked expressions

Researchers have revealed a computer system that can spot faked expressions of pain more accurately than people can. It could also help detect deceptive actions at job screenings, security issues and so on.

A joint study was conducted by researchers at the University of California (UC), San Diego and the University of Toronto and the work titled "Automatic Decoding of Deceptive Pain Expressions" was published in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology.

"The computer system managed to detect distinctive dynamic features of facial expressions that people missed," said Marian Bartlett, research professor at UC San Diego's Institute for Neural Computation and lead author of the study.

"Human observers just aren't very good at telling real from faked expressions of pain," she said.

The research team found that humans could not distinguish between real from faked expressions of pain better than random chance, and even after training only improved accuracy to a modest 55 percent. The computer system attains an 85 percent accuracy, reported Science Daily.

Senior author Kang Lee, professor at the Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, said: "Humans can simulate facial expressions and fake emotions well enough to deceive most observers. The computer's pattern-recognition abilities prove better at telling whether the pain expression is real or faked."