veritasium

NEW VIDEO: Can You Hear Pictures? (Patreon)

Published:

2019-03-01 16:11:38

Imported:

2026-06

Content

I have been interested in this research for a long time - can you recover audio information from image-only video?

This work was originally done at MIT by Dr. Abe Davis and colleagues. Abe was kind enough to revisit an experiment for me using code he hadn't touched in years. I learned a lot - it's way more sophisticated than looking for motion in the video (because these sound motions can't actually be seen - they're much smaller than a pixel).

This video had a significant sponsor so it is an unpaid post. I know some of you wouldn't mind supporting a post like this but I think it's best to conserve your resources. Sponsorships can be great especially when they stay out of the creative and allow me to do things I couldn't do easily on my own, like fly to San Jose and buy a camera in a pinch to get a higher frame rate.

Files

Can You Hear Pictures?

Is it possible to reconstruct sound from high-speed video images? Part of this video was sponsored by LastPass: http://bit.ly/2SmRQkk Special thanks to Dr. Abe Davis for revisiting his research with me: http://abedavis.com This video was based on research by Dr. Abe Davis and colleagues. I found out about this work years ago and was fascinated by the way he was able to capture vibration information in image-only video. I always imagined the motions of objects would be visible as when recording a tuning fork in slow motion - so deriving sound from high speed images seemed a feasible task. But the reality is much more difficult. Sound vibrations only cause objects to wiggle by about a micrometer. This is much smaller than a pixel, so the algorithm must understand the characteristics of the image. A move in one direction should cause some pixels to lighten slightly, while others darken - and this behavior is correlated along the edges of the image. So noise can be reduced because it's random over the image and there are enough places to sample that you can get it to cancel out. Something I'm wondering now is - would it be possible to capture sound in a single image? I'm thinking it would have to be an image of a large object or space because the wavelengths of typical sounds are quite long. Maybe a high frequency sound could be imaged in a suitable medium... Animations by Alan Chamberlain Music from http://epidemicsound.com "Seaweed"