Visual Vibration Tomography: Estimating Interior Material Properties from Monocular Video

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to estimate an object's interior material properties, like Young's modulus and density, from monocular videos of surface vibrations, enabling detailed non-destructive testing.

Contribution

It presents a new approach that infers spatially-varying material properties from surface vibration videos, surpassing traditional methods that only estimate average properties or detect defects.

Findings

Successfully estimates interior material properties from simulated videos.

Accurately identifies material property variations in real-world videos.

Provides a non-invasive technique for detailed material characterization.

Abstract

An object's interior material properties, while invisible to the human eye, determine motion observed on its surface. We propose an approach that estimates heterogeneous material properties of an object from a monocular video of its surface vibrations. Specifically, we show how to estimate Young's modulus and density throughout a 3D object with known geometry. Knowledge of how these values change across the object is useful for simulating its motion and characterizing any defects. Traditional non-destructive testing approaches, which often require expensive instruments, generally estimate only homogenized material properties or simply identify the presence of defects. In contrast, our approach leverages monocular video to (1) identify image-space modes from an object's sub-pixel motion, and (2) directly infer spatially-varying Young's modulus and density values from the observed modes. We demonstrate our approach on both simulated and real videos.