Naughty or nice technology makes Santa's job easier

William Atkins
Monday, 21 December 2009 19:06

Science - Biology

Automated expression recognition technology by the CSIRO is making Santa Claus’ job a lot easier these days. He may only need to check his list once, not twice, to see if you’ve been naughty or nice.


According to the 12-21-2009 CSIRO press release How could Santa know if you’ve been good or bad?, “CSIRO is using automated expression recognition technology to tell whether someone is in pain and, according to computer scientist, CSIRO’s Dr Simon Lucey, there’s no reason why Santa couldn’t train the system to find out who’s been naughty or nice.”

Oh, you better watch out ... Santa knows! He's using high-tech gadgets!

CSIRO senior research scientist Simon Lucey, the lead scientist in the computer project, stated, “Each facial expression is made up of many different components – a twitch of the mouth here, a widening of the eyes there – some lasting only a fraction of a second.”

Dr. Lucey, who is also an assistant research professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.) adds, “Our computer program looks at these components, matches them against a list drawn up by expert psychologists and decides what expression just flitted across a face.”

Although facial expressions may get by the casual human observer, it is much more difficult to fool the CSIRO computer.

The CSIRO scientists have found that regardless of the person—it doesn’t matter where you live and what your background is—we all have the same general types of facial expressions for pain, innocence, lying, nice, and naughty.

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