Visual Surface Wave Elastography: Revealing Subsurface Physical Properties via Visible Surface Waves

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for inferring subsurface physical properties like thickness and stiffness from surface wave videos, enabling non-invasive, at-home health monitoring and applications in human-computer interaction.

Contribution

The paper presents a new approach that extracts dispersion relations from surface wave videos and solves a physics-based optimization to determine subsurface properties.

Findings

Strong agreement with ground-truth measurements on simulated data

Effective on real data demonstrating practical applicability

Potential for at-home health monitoring and HCI applications

Abstract

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.