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Uncovering Lying Detection using Blood Volume Pulse and Electrodermal

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Conference Paper · January 2013

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 Uncovering Lying Detection using Blood Volume
Pulse and Electrodermal Activity
Ana Priscila Alves∗ , Hugo Silva∗ , André Lourenço∗,† , Ana Fred∗ , Inês Montalvão‡ and Leonel Alegre‡
∗ IT - Instituto de Telecomunicações
Instituto Superior Técnico, Avenida Rovisco Pais, 1
1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal
Email: {AnaPriscila.Alves, hugo.silva, arlourenco, afred}@lx.it.pt
† Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa

Rua Conselheiro Emı́dio Navarro, 1

1959-007 Lisboa, Portugal
‡ Ciência Viva - Agência Nacional para a Cultura Cientı́fica e Tecnológica

Alameda dos Oceanos Lote 2.10.01

1990-223 Lisboa, Portugal
Email: imontalvao@cienciaviva.pt, lalegre@pavconhecimento.pt

Abstract—Biosignals have a wide range of applications; a well-
know albeit controversial use is on the polygraph test, where
multimodal biosignal data is used by a trained inspector with
the objective of detecting wether a person is telling the truth
or not. In this work we address this problem in a pedagogical
way targeted at entertainment, building a demonstration setup,
where two persons play a game based on the lying detection.
We present a preliminary approach to a supervised learning and
classification algorithm, in which the purpose is to detect when
a lie occurs, with an accuracy superior to that of a human user.
Experimental results on real-world data enabled us to grasp the
potential of biosignals for this task and draw several guidelines
for future work.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Biosignals can be generally defined as observations of
electrophysiological, biomechanical, or chemical processes of
a living organism, ranging from protein and gene sequences,
neural or cardiac rhythms, to tissue and organ images. The
goal of biomedical signal processing is the extraction of
significant information from the collected biosignals, often,
in a multimodal approach [1]. Electrophysiological signals,
in particular, are records of the bio-electrical activity across
specialized tissues, organs or cells; their current range of
applications is very wide, and through the novel trends towards
biosignal-based wellbeing and quality of life products for end-
users [2], [3], [4], it is now a rapidly growing multi-million
dollar market.
A classical and well known use of electrophysiological
signals is the polygraph test. The so-called ”lie detector”
involves inferring deception through analysis of physiologi-
cal responses to a structured, but unstandardized, series of
questions. Typically, the instrument used to conduct polygraph
tests consists of a physiological recorder that assesses three
indicators of autonomic arousal [5]: heart rate, blood pressure,
respiration, and electrodermal activity. The most common
applications of this test has been done for criminal verifications
and is based on the expertise of a good tester. However,
computer algorithms are now being developed to score the
tests or verify the results [6], [7]. In the same perspective,
we formulate this problem in a supervised learning approach,
using as a classification algorithm a decision tree [8], and
explore different features extracted from the acquired signals.
In this work we address this problem in a pedagogical
way, building a demonstration setup, where two persons play
a game based on the lying detection. One of the players is
trying to fake (the Pinocchio) and the other (the Inspector) is
attempting to detect, from a set of answers, the one that is
untrue. The Pinocchio is being monitored and our goal is to
demonstrate the potential of the electrophysiological signals
in uncovering the deceitful answer.
Our paper is organized as follows: in section II we describe
the chosen modalities and the devised experimental setup; in
section III we summarize the extracted features; in section IV
we describe the classification algorithm used; on sections V
and VI we present the evaluation methodology and preliminary
results; finally on section VII we draw conclusions and present
future research directions.
II. E XPERIMENTAL S ETUP
From the polygraph test literature [9], it is believed that
deceptive answers trigger physiological responses that can be
distinguished from non-deceptive answers. These responses
can be measured using different kinds of biosignals, such as
Heart Rate, Respiration and Electrodermal Activity.
In this work, we concentrate our effort only on the physi-
ological differences triggered by deceptive answers, using the
Blood Volume Pulse (BVP) and Electrodermal Activity (EDA)
signals. This choice was taken focusing on a non-intrusive
setup, without requiring complicated instrumentation and in
an off-the-person approach. Figure 1 presents the devised
experimental setup, and the workfollow that we propose to
automatically analyze the electrophysiological signals. The
BVP and EDA are acquired from the Pinnochio hand, using
the BITalino acquisition unit [10], which is a custom made
Arduino board, at 1000Hz with 10 bits resolution. These
signals are then transmitted via Bluetooth to a computational
unit, where features are extracted and decisions are produced
using a supervised classification algorithm.
It is known that emotional situations, such as stress, anger,
amusement, lead to variations in the heart rate, which can be
obtained through blood volume pulse signals.
Fig. 1. Experimental Setup
The Blood Volume Pulse (BVP) measures the variation
of the blood flow within the vessels surrounding the sensor
region, by emitting a light onto the surface of the skin, and
measuring the amount of light reflected back to the sensor.
When the blood is pumped through the capillaries, it increases
the opacity of the finger, resulting in a higher amount of light
reflected back to the sensor, which decreases until a new heart
beat occurs. Thus, each maximum peak of BVP corresponds
to a heart beat, from which the heart rate can be derived.
The BVP acquisition is based on an optical emitter/sensor
combination, which is typically, placed on one finger.
Electrodermal activity (EDA) refers to electrical changes
measured at the surface of the skin due to the variation of the
perspiration on the skin. This is a result of the sweat glands
activity, and it is regulated by the sympathetic nervous system.
This can be a good indicator of arousal, since it is directly
related to emotional variations, and as such, is prone to be
related with a lie.
Fig. 2. Result data visualization of EDA, Heart Rate and BVP signals; The
red timestamps mark the instant where each answer is initiated, and the grey
regions indicate the interval where the lie answer occurred.
With these two biosignals, we expect to detect significant
variations that will allow us to detect true/untrue answers.
The experimental protocol was as follows: a) the Pinocchio
would be presented with a set of objects placed before him
in random sequence; b) the Pinocchio was asked to conceal
an object of choice; c) the Inspector was provided with the
initial set of objects presented to Pinocchio; d) sitting face-to-
face with Pinocchio, the Inspector would ask in turn whether
the object was concealed or not; e) Pinocchio was required
to always reply with the sentence ”I have not concealed this
object”; f) in the end, the Inspector was required to guess for
which object was Pinocchio lying .
To increase the intensity and potentiate arousal in the
Pinocchio character, a movie-like environment containing an
oscillating light bulb and a sound clip was created. Ground-
truth annotations were performed using a manual record, and
the question transition events were marked on the BITalino
synchronously with the biosignal data using an analog switch.
In figure 2 we present an acquisition record of the obtained
BVP and EDA signals, and also the Heart Rate variation
through time. Each red timestamp indicates the instant when
the Pinocchio starts answering, while the grey region indicates
the interval where the lie occured. This visualization tool
allows us to better inspect the changes occurring through the
different true/untrue answers.
III. F EATURE E XTRACTION
The identification of particular variations in physiological
signals can be done using pattern recognition algorithms. We
perform an initial pre-processing step, where, the input data
is first reduced to a set of features representing information
extracted from each signal. This process is called feature
extraction and it involves carefully observation of the signals
variations and most important characteristics, according to the
classification objective.
The Electrodermal Response (EDR) is a particular measure
of the electrodermal activity, obtained when a known voltage
is applied to the body of the user, and the voltage drop between
two terminals is measured. Its variation can be an indicator of
emotional alterations, possibly indicating deceptive answers.
The heart rate variability is also related to the emotional
responses to different stimuli.
To quantitatively determine the physiological changes
caused by true or false answers, we analyze individually each
answer. We consider that each answer is characterized by the
signal from 2 seconds before the answer instant until 5 seconds
after, as represented by the regions in grey in Figure 2.
Consider x the EDA signal corresponding to an answer, xi
the i-th sample of the signal, u(x) the mean value of the signal
and N the number of samples; we define rest, as the signal
corresponding to 2 seconds before the pinocchio answer, and
stimulate (stim), as the 5 seconds after start answering. From
signal x, we extract the following features:
• Kurtosis:
1
PN 4
i=1 (xi −u(x))
Kurtosis(x) = N
PN 2 −3
( 1
N i=1 (xi −u(x))
2
)
 • Integral
PN
Integral(x) = i=1 (xi − min(rest))
• Time Above:
PN
T imeAbove(x) = i=0 stimi , when
PN
stimi > N1 i=1 resti
• Difference between the minimum and maximum value of
the signal:
Dif f M inM ax(x) = M ax(x) − M in(x)
In what concerns to Blood Volume Pulse, it is mainly used
to determine the heart rate (HR), which can be calculated by
detecting the instants, thb
i , where peaks in BVP occured, and
apply the following formula:
HRi = 60.0
thb
i+1 −ti
hb
The features extracted from BVP were:
• Mean Heart Rate
PNb
M eanHR = N1b i=1 HRi
• Mean Heart Rate increment
PNb
HRI = i=1 (HRi+1 − HRi )
• Minimum, Maximum and Mean Amplitude: the ampli-
tude corresponds to the difference between the maximum
and minimum value in each BVP peak. From all the am-
plitudes calculated, we extract the maximum, minimum
and mean value.
Afterwards, we looked to each record and took into account
the possible relation between the answers, considering that
only one could be a lie. The analysis consisted on the
calculation of the first and second maximum of each feature.
We concluded that the false answer often occurs when:
• the maximum (or 2nd maximum) of the integral of EDA
matched the maximum(or 2nd maximum) of the time
above EDA feature
• the 2nd maximum of the heart rate increment, calculated
from BVP, occur
Based on these observations, two binary features were
created, where the feature value is 1, when the condition
itemized occurs.
IV. C LASSIFICATION
The classification was based on a supervised learning ap-
proach, using labeled training data to predict the result with
subsets of features. The training data consists of a matrix,
where each line represents one answer, while each column
is one of the features described in the previous section.
Associated with this matrix is a column vector with the labels,
that is, the ground-truth responses resulting from each record.
There are different supervised learning classification algo-
rithms available, however, in this work we focused on binary
trees, where in each node the value of a feature is tested,
since it is a method simple to understand and interpret. The
classifier algorithm construct a series of test questions in a tree
structure, based on the training data. In the binary tree, the root
and internal nodes contain test conditions to separate records
that have different characteristics, while all the terminal nodes
are assigned with a class label Yes or No. In our particular
work, the terminal nodes will indicate if the answer was true
or false. We used the scikit-learn library [11] implementation
of the CART (Classification and Regression Trees) algorithm,
which constructs a binary tree using the feature and threshold
that yield the largest information gain at each node [8].
We constructed four classifiers, which differ in the set of
features used. The first classifier, CALL , was built with all
the features extracted, with exception of the binary ones. In
the second classifier, C2 , we tried a different combination of
features, chosen according to an empirical analysis. It was
constituted by:
• Mean Heart Rate increment of BVP (BVP.MeanHRI)
• EDA Integral (EDA.Integral)
• EDA Time Above (EDA.TimeAbove)
• EDA Kurtosis (EDA.Kurtosis)
The third classifier, C3 , was composed of the features in C2
and the two binary features. Finally, the fourth classifier, C4 ,
combined the two binary features with the Integral of EDA
and the Mean Heart Rate extracted from BVP.
V. E VALUATION
To evaluate the classification performance, three different
tests were made:
a) Re-substitution method: The prediction is made using test
data that is included in the training group.
b) Leave-One-Out (LOO) method: Each learning set is cre-
ated by taking all the samples except one, the test set
being the sample left out. This cross-validation procedure
does not waste much data as only one sample is removed
from the learning set [8];
c) K-Fold Cross Validation method: Samples are divided
in K groups, called folds, of equal size. The prediction
function is learned using K-1 folds, and the fold left out
is used for testing;
VI. R ESULTS
The classification method evaluation was performed with
16 records, from which 9 were made using 5 objects and 7
with 6 objects. Each record contains the EDA and BVP signals
during the response to 5/6 questions according to the amount
of objects. In all of these records only one answer is considered
false, while the other 4 or 5 answers are true. The training
data used to construct the decision tree was based on these
records, where each line of the training matrix represented
one answer. In every evaluation, the training data was divided
in two groups, corresponding to the tests with 5 and 6 objects.
Thus, the results of the classification are always evaluated
separately.
The result of the 4 classifiers detailed in section IV are
summarized in Figure 3.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was partially funded by Fundação para a Ciência
e Tecnologia (FCT) under the grants SFRH/BD/65248/2009
and SFRH/PROTEC/49512/2009, and by the Fundação para a
Ciência Viva under the project ”Mentir de Verdade”, whose
support the authors gratefully acknowledge.
R EFERENCES
[1] H.-H. Chang and J. M. F. Moura, Biomedical Engineering and Design
Handbook. McGraw Hill, June 2009, ch. Biomedical signal processing.
[2] AliveCor. (2012) iPhone ECG accessory. [Online]. Available: http:
//www.alivecor.com
[3] EPI Mobile Solutions. (2012) EPI life: A doctor in your
pocket! [Online]. Available: http://epilife.files.wordpress.com/2012/
Fig. 3. Evaluation results of the four classifiers
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[4] Adidas. (2012) miCoach heart rate monitor. [Online]. Available:
http://www.adidas.com/us/micoach/ui/Product/\#!/heartrate
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VII. C ONCLUSIONS AND F UTURE W ORK

The lie detection is a topic that has attracted the attention

of many specialists; however it continues to be regarded as
a test with low credibility. In this paper we have created an
experimental setup to study this process of lie detection, using
only two of the electrophysiological signals present in the
real polygraph: Blood Volume Pulse (BVP) and Electrodermal
Activity (EDA). The experimental setup created allows to
acquire, non-intrusively, these signals, which will enable its
future use in a demonstrator to be used in a didactic exhibition.
The methodology explored in this work is based on training
data used in a decision tree classifier. The results presented are
preliminary, since the dataset available has reduced dimension.
However, it should be noted that the best performance achieved
was 71% of true negatives with the 6 objects experiment.
Future work will be focused on performing more record
acquisitions, which will contribute to further validate our
results. Moreover, the prototype used in this experiment will
suffer some modifications, which include a system to supervise
the ”false” answer, leading to a reinforcement of the training
set.

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