Visual Data Mining: A Great Opportunity for Criminal Investigation

Current generation criminal justice relies mostly on manual procedures and processes which are time-consuming and error-prone. A polygraph test consists of only “yes” or “no” questions and depends several physiological responses in subjects. It’s effectiveness and accuracy have been questioned due to the possibility of swaying the examiner by individuals that are capable of controlling their physical reactions in order to defeat the lie detection exercise. The criminal justice of the future is expected to be empowered by the most modern information and communication technologies to provide various participants in the justice system with a rich set of services such as virtual court presence and hearing participation through visual sensor networks. This chapter revisits the issue of deception detection by proposing visual data mining as a non-invasive alternative to deception detection in next generation criminal justice. Image processing and machine learning techniques are used to accurately detect facial micro-expressions which have been shown to be strong indicators of deception. Mehrdad Ghaziasgar University of the Western Cape, South Africa Nathan De La Cruz University of the Western Cape, South Africa Antoine Bagula University of the Western Cape, South Africa James Connan Rhodes University, South Africa