A cold one (Image: Getty Images/Visuals Unlimited/Scientifica)
We all know the telltale signs of someone whose had a little too much to drink - slurred speech, swaying walk and a red flush in the face.
But what you might not realise is that as the alcohol causes dilation of blood vessels in the surface of the skin, certain parts of your face warm up disproportionately. Now a team at the University of Patras in Greece has come up with two different ways of measuring these temperature changes to automatically detect when someone has been drinking.
Georgia Koukiou and colleagues trained thermal cameras on volunteers who were drinking beers. Software picked out 20 points on each volunteer's face and the temperature was logged. The more the volunteers drank, the warmer these regions in their face became. Matched against a thermal database of sober faces, the simple approach could give an indication that someone has been drinking. Similar thermal-imaging technology was used during the SARS crisis in China in 2003 to screen people as they boarded planes. Fever is a symptom of SARS infection.
In the second approach, an algorithm was used to compare the temperature differences in different regions of someone's face. The team saw that a drinker's nose becomes relatively hotter than their forehead the more alcohol they drink.
A system running similar facial recognition software could be used alongside a thermal camera outside nightclubs or at airport security. Simply put, if your nose is hotter than your forehead, it's probably time to go home and sleep it off.
Journal reference: International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, vol 4, p 229
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