Exploring facial cues: automated deception detection using artificial intelligence

Abstract Deception detection is an interdisciplinary field attracting researchers from psychology, criminology, computer science, and economics. Automated deception detection presents unique challenges compared to traditional polygraph tests, but also offers novel economic applications. In this spirit, we propose an approach combining deep learning with discriminative models for deception detection. Therefore, we train CNNs for the facial modalities of gaze, head pose, and facial expressions, allowing us to compute facial cues. Due to the very limited availability of training data for deception, we utilize early fusion on the CNN outputs to perform deception classification. We evaluate our approach on five datasets, including four well-known publicly available datasets and a new economically motivated rolling dice experiment. Results reveal performance differences among modalities, with facial expressions outperforming gaze and head pose overall. Combining multiple modalities and feature selection consistently enhances detection performance. The observed variations in expressed features across datasets with different contexts affirm the importance of scenario-specific training data for effective deception detection, further indicating the influence of context on deceptive behavior. Cross-dataset experiments reinforce these findings. Notably, low-stake datasets, including the rolling dice Experiment, present more challenges for deception detection compared to the high-stake Real-Life trials dataset. Nevertheless, various evaluation measures show deception detection performance surpassing chance levels. Our proposed approach and comprehensive evaluation highlight the challenges and potential of automating deception detection from facial cues, offering promise for future research.