What's in Your Face.(facial expression recognition software applications)

When James J. Newberry started doing police work in California 30 years ago, questioning suspects often amounted to one thing: tossing the guy against the wall. "I decided there had to be a kinder, gentler way," he says. Newberry began studying the faces of the people he was interrogating. He got so good at picking liars from truth tellers that psychologist Paul Ekman, of the University of California, San Francisco, began studying Newberry in the late '80s. His talent, it turned out, was for detecting those faint or fleeting expressions in a suspect's face that seemed inconsistent with what he was saying or other clues. Ekman called them "microexpressions."

Since then, Ekman has been teaching law-enforcement officers how to catch microexpressions and has written a book about them--"Emotions Revealed." He even trained Newberry to get perfect scores recognizing liars on videotape. Now the U.S. Defense Department and the CIA are funding work to incorporate Ekman's research into software that would analyze facial movements captured by digital cameras. Terry Sejnowski, a neurobiologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, wants to develop an airport-security system that in a few years could notify airport workers of peculiarities around your lips (suppressed anger, perhaps?) while you're answering questions.

Ordinary observation just isn't up to the task of catching liars. Judges, therapists and spies do no better than chance when asked to identify liars on videotape. In the 1970s Ekman developed a numbering technique--the Facial Action Coding System--for the movements of facial muscles. Narrowing your lips is 23; tightening a lip corner is 14. While recording these details, he observed expressions that flash across the face in as little as a 20th of a second.

Ekman guessed that certain gifted people who were good at catching lies noticed microexpressions without realizing it. So he sought out stars in law enforcement, including Newberry, tested their performance and honed their instincts with training. Seeing lies isn't easy. There's no ...