Rubinstein was also behind the work on using pixel intensity variations to visualize... stuff. They used it to extract heart rates. I am guessing sillier methods used, but now to recover induced vibrations due to sound. Interesting work.
The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
#22Well that's pretty scary. I can see one application of this already: casinos in the US are legally prohibited from recording audio on their floors, but have perfectly positioned cameras everywhere. Beyond that, I'm guessing every spy agency on earth will be buying solutions based on this. It would be interesting to know what the genesis of this project was - for example if the NSA or CIA was involved in suggesting to…
Spy agencies already have a laser they can put on a window to recover audio from the vibration and other similar devices. This isn't really that different. It seems behind current spook hardware, honestly.
Re: The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
#23Well that's pretty scary. I can see one application of this already: casinos in the US are legally prohibited from recording audio on their floors, but have perfectly positioned cameras everywhere. Beyond that, I'm guessing every spy agency on earth will be buying solutions based on this. It would be interesting to know what the genesis of this project was - for example if the NSA or CIA was involved in suggesting to…
This is a very mission-specific technology.
No, it's really not, there a ton of engineering and scientific uses where it may be useful to measure acoustic emissions off a vibrating surface, but it may be infusible or too resource intensive to attach/deploy conventional acoustic transducers. For example, characterizing sound sources in moving vehicles like trains (which currently require microphone arrays and a lot of post-processing) or wind turbines (which require expensive sound intensity measurement equipment).
If the cost of high-speed cameras come down, this could be a valuable alternative.
Re: The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
#24Well that's pretty scary. I can see one application of this already: casinos in the US are legally prohibited from recording audio on their floors, but have perfectly positioned cameras everywhere. Beyond that, I'm guessing every spy agency on earth will be buying solutions based on this. It would be interesting to know what the genesis of this project was - for example if the NSA or CIA was involved in suggesting to…
Spy agencies already have a laser they can put on a window to recover audio from the vibration and other similar devices. This isn't really that different. It seems behind current spook hardware, honestly.
But this is passive, which would undoubtedly have advantages to spies
Re: The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I suspect that you could combine video feeds from several lower speed cameras to give you an effective 1000FPS.
Yes but you have to precisely stagger the start of expositions of each camera and it's hard to do on consumer hardware.
Um, why would you have to precisely stagger?
I suspect that you have enough information to actually align the videos after the fact.
10 videos at 250FPS would probably distribute sufficiently.
Re: The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
#26I wonder how this would perform on iPhone 6's (or others) high speed camera.
Re: The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
#27Patent pending? The approach should be trivially obvious for anyone familiar with the basics. What happened to the MIT License and liberating knowledge, does MIT not do that anymore?
"It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too."
It is a very good idea, but there's another problem at hand: It's not novel. I remember hearing about this many years ago, though that was using vibrations in windows to get the sound inside a building. IMO there's nothing to patent here. Unless this is the same group it's just appropriating someone else's work.
Besides, random people do think of cool stuff all the time. They just don't normally patent it or start a business based on it. I thought of real-time music streaming to phones as a subscription service way before Spotify was a thing, but there wasn't much that 15 year old me could do about it. To this day I still have no idea how I would have gone about with a similarly good idea if I got one again.
Re: The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too."
It is a very good idea, but there's another problem at hand: It's not novel. I remember hearing about this many years ago, though that was using vibrations in windows to get the sound inside a building. IMO there's nothing to patent here. Unless this is the same group it's just appropriating someone else's work. Besides, random people do think of cool stuff all the time. They just don't normally patent it or start a…
It was a plot point in the movie Eagle Eye, which came out in 2008. Maybe there's something more specific in the patent though.
And I don't know if there was a real service for this, but the idea of music streaming to phones is pretty old. Peter Shickele used it on his parody album Two Pianos are Better than One which came out in 1994. It was called "Inter-Ear TelecommuniCulturePhone - Trademark!"
Re: The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
#29Someone give this to the writers of crappy TV that uses the enhanced photo line I am sure they will flip out at the whole new story lines created by this.
CSI has forever been changed. Bet you it is on next season on multiple of TV crime shows.
Re: The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
#30Patent pending? The approach should be trivially obvious for anyone familiar with the basics. What happened to the MIT License and liberating knowledge, does MIT not do that anymore?
You can't patent an idea. The patent is for the method of extracting sound from tiny vibrations in a video. The method is novel and non-obvious, and follows from their work in motion magnification.