The music of silence: new video tech looks at night internet of things

Recent discussions about video surveillance refer to online privacy and in what way technology including wearable devices and CCTV can compromise people’s privacy. This has led to the growth of more technology to counter these intrusions.

Anti-tracking and anti-surveillance software allows users to overpower the visibility of the online activities. Wearable devices just like Google Glass and also the Apple Watch and Facebook’s tag suggest feature, which helps visitors to be tagged in photos and video footage without their consent, have brought about concerns with regards to the to anonymity when doing activities offline as well as coming of makeup, clothes and accessories that can block facial recognition.

Another hot topic could be the internet of products (IoT), whereby connected devices collect and communicate user data. That as well is creating concerns about privacy and anonymity. But recent research using high-speed video technology reveals there presently exists much more to objects than user data. Actually, there are other to objects than what you know already.

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Transforming objects into visual microphones

Computer vision expert, musician and MIT PhD student Abe Davis has created video technology that reveals an object’s hidden properties. A type of properties is sound.

Davis uses high-speed silent video to capture and reproduce sound, including music and intelligible speech, with the vibrations it can make on inanimate objects. His beginning was software put together by Michael Rubinstein among others at MIT. Article sites . amplifies subtle motions in video so they become adequate enough to observe, by way of example, revealing the heartbeat in someone’s wrist in sufficient detail to measure their heartrate. Davis chosen to apply the idea of extending our a sense of touch to video by developing software that effectively uses video to “hear”.

Sound causes all objects to vibrate, but the vibrations are usually too subtle and too fast to become visible. Davis records these vibrations on high-speed video and analyses them in a method extracts the sounds that created them, thereby turning objects into visual microphones. Initially, he recorded music in the vibrations it made upon an empty crisp packet within the where that it was being played. When the rope extended the power to recording conversations behind soundproof glass coming from a distance and capturing music by filming the vibrations of plastic earphones attached to a computer.

Davis’ technique is non-invasive and require specialist cameras, although higher-quality equipment captures more detail.

This is just not groundbreaking in relation to surveillance, as laser microphones have long been useful to record conversations originating from a distance eventhough it is capable of similar results without sophisticated and dear equipment