Publications

Eulerian Video Magnification and Analysis

Communications of the ACM

Publication date: January 1, 2017

Neal Wadhwa, Hao-Yu Wu, Abe Davis, Michael Rubinstein, Eugene Shih, Gautham Mysore, Justin G. Chen, Oral Buyukozturk, John V. Guttag, William T. Freeman, Frédo Durand

The world is filled with important, but visually subtle signals. A person’s pulse, the breathing of an infant, the sag and sway of a bridge—these all create visual patterns, which are too difficult to see with the naked eye. We present Eulerian Video Magnification, a computational technique for visualizing subtle color and motion variations in ordinary videos by making the variations larger. It is a microscope for small changes that are hard or impossible for us to see by ourselves. In addition, these small changes can be quantitatively analyzed and used to recover sounds from vibrations in distant objects, characterize material properties, and remotely measure a person’s pulse.