Visual Surface Wave Elastography: Revealing Subsurface Physical Properties via Visible Surface Waves
This provides a proof-of-concept for at-home health monitoring of tissue properties, with incremental applications in fields like human-computer interaction.
The researchers tackled the problem of inferring subsurface physical properties like thickness and stiffness from video of surface waves, achieving strong agreement with ground-truth measurements in simulations and real data.
Wave propagation on the surface of a material contains information about physical properties beneath its surface. We propose a method for inferring the thickness and stiffness of a structure from just a video of waves on its surface. Our method works by extracting a dispersion relation from the video and then solving a physics-based optimization problem to find the best-fitting thickness and stiffness parameters. We validate our method on both simulated and real data, in both cases showing strong agreement with ground-truth measurements. Our technique provides a proof-of-concept for at-home health monitoring of medically-informative tissue properties, and it is further applicable to fields such as human-computer interaction.