So over the past few centuries,
microscopes have revolutionized our world.
They revealed to us a tiny world
of objects, life and structures
that are too small for us
to see with our naked eyes.
They are a tremendous contribution
to science and technology.
Today I'd like to introduce you
to a new type of microscope,
a microscope for changes.
It doesn't use optics
like a regular microscope
to make small objects bigger,
but instead it uses a video camera
and image processing
to reveal to us the tiniest motions
and color changes in objects and people,
changes that are impossible
for us to see with our naked eyes.
And it lets us look at our world
in a completely new way.
So what do I mean by color changes?
Our skin, for example,
changes its color very slightly
when the blood flows under it.
That change is incredibly subtle,
which is why, when you look
at other people,
when you look at the person
sitting next to you,
you don't see their skin
or their face changing color.
When we look at this video of Steve here,
it appears to us like a static picture,
but once we look at this video
through our new, special microscope,
suddenly we see
a completely different image.
What you see here are small changes
in the color of Steve's skin,
magnified 100 times
so that they become visible.
We can actually see a human pulse.
We can see how fast
Steve's heart is beating,
but we can also see the actual way
that the blood flows in his face.
And we can do that not just
to visualize the pulse,
but also to actually recover
our heart rates,
and measure our heart rates.
And we can do it with regular cameras
and without touching the patients.
So here you see the pulse and heart rate
we extracted from a neonatal baby
from a video we took
with a regular DSLR camera,
and the heart rate measurement we get
is as accurate as the one you'd get
with a standard monitor in a hospital.
And it doesn't even have to be
a video we recorded.
We can do it essentially
with other videos as well.
So I just took a short clip
from "Batman Begins" here
just to show Christian Bale's pulse.
(Laughter)
And you know, presumably
he's wearing makeup,
the lighting here is kind of challenging,
but still, just from the video,
we're able to extract his pulse
and show it quite well.
So how do we do all that?
We basically analyze the changes
in the light that are recorded
at every pixel in the video over time,
and then we crank up those changes.
We make them bigger
so that we can see them.
The tricky part is that those signals,
those changes that we're after,
are extremely subtle,
so we have to be very careful
when you try to separate them
from noise that always exists in videos.
So we use some clever
image processing techniques
to get a very accurate measurement
of the color at each pixel in the video,
and then the way
the color changes over time,
and then we amplify those changes.
We make them bigger to create those types
of enhanced videos, or magnified videos,
that actually show us those changes.
But it turns out we can do that
not just to show tiny changes in color,
but also tiny motions,
and that's because the light
that gets recorded in our cameras
will change not only if the color
of the object changes,
but also if the object moves.
So this is my daughter
when she was about two months old.
It's a video I recorded
about three years ago.
And as new parents, we all want
to make sure our babies are healthy,
that they're breathing,
that they're alive, of course.
So I too got one of those baby monitors
so that I could see my daughter
when she was asleep.
And this is pretty much what you'll see
with a standard baby monitor.
You can see the baby's sleeping,
but there's not too much information
there.
There's not too much we can see.
Wouldn't it be better,
or more informative, or more useful,
if instead we could look
at the view like this.
So here I took the motions
and I magnified them 30 times,
and then I could clearly see
that my daughter
was indeed alive and breathing.
(Laughter)
Here is a side-by-side comparison.
So again, in the source video,
in the original video,
there's not too much we can see,
but once we magnify the motions,
the breathing becomes much more visible.
And it turns out,
there's a lot of phenomena
we can reveal and magnify
with our new motion microscope.
We can see how our veins and arteries
are pulsing in our bodies.
We can see that our eyes
are constantly moving
in this wobbly motion.
And that's actually my eye,
and again this video was taken
right after my daughter was born,
so you can see I wasn't getting
too much sleep. (Laughter)
Even when a person is sitting still,
there's a lot of information
we can extract
about their breathing patterns,
small facial expressions.
Maybe we could use those motions
to tell us something about
our thoughts or our emotions.
We can also magnify
small mechanical movements,
like vibrations in engines,
that can help engineers detect
and diagnose machinery problems,
or see how our buildings and structures
sway in the wind and react to forces.
Those are all things that our society
knows how to measure in various ways,
but measuring those motions is one thing,
and actually seeing those motions
as they happen
is a whole different thing.
And ever since we discovered
this new technology,
we made our code available online
so that others could use
and experiment with it.
It's very simple to use.
It can work on your own videos.
Our collaborators at Quantum Research
even created this nice website
where you can upload your videos
and process them online,
so even if you don't have any experience
in computer science or programming,
you can still very easily experiment
with this new microscope.
And I'd like to show you
just a couple of examples
of what others have done with it.
So this video was made
by a YouTube user called Tamez85.
I don't know who that user is,
but he, or she, used our code
to magnify small belly movements
during pregnancy.
It's kind of creepy.
(Laughter)
People have used it to magnify
pulsing veins in their hands.
And you know it's not real science
unless you use guinea pigs,
and apparently this guinea pig
is called Tiffany,
and this YouTube user claims
it is the first rodent on Earth
that was motion-magnified.
You can also do some art with it.
So this video was sent to me
by a design student at Yale.
She wanted to see
if there's any difference
in the way her classmates move.
She made them all stand still,
and then magnified their motions.
It's like seeing still pictures
come to life.
And the nice thing with all those examples
is that we had nothing to do with them.
We just provided this new tool,
a new way to look at the world,
and then people find other interesting,
new and creative ways of using it.
But we didn't stop there.
This tool not only allows us
to look at the world in a new way,
it also redefines what we can do
and pushes the limits
of what we can do with our cameras.
So as scientists, we started wondering,
what other types of physical phenomena
produce tiny motions
that we could now use
our cameras to measure?
And one such phenomenon
that we focused on recently is sound.
Sound, as we all know,
is basically changes
in air pressure
that travel through the air.
Those pressure waves hit objects
and they create small vibrations in them,
which is how we hear
and how we record sound.
But it turns out that sound
also produces visual motions.
Those are motions
that are not visible to us
but are visible to a camera
with the right processing.
So here are two examples.
This is me demonstrating
my great singing skills.
(Singing)
(Laughter)
And I took a high-speed video
of my throat while I was humming.
Again, if you stare at that video,
there's not too much
you'll be able to see,
but once we magnify the motions 100 times,
we can see all the motions and ripples
in the neck that are involved
in producing the sound.
That signal is there in that video.
We also know that singers
can break a wine glass
if they hit the correct note.
So here, we're going to play a note
that's in the resonance frequency
of that glass
through a loudspeaker that's next to it.
Once we play that note
and magnify the motions 250 times,
we can very clearly see
how the glass vibrates
and resonates in response to the sound.
It's not something you're used to seeing
every day.
And we actually have the demo
right outside set up,
so I encourage you to stop by,
and just play with it yourself,
you can actually see it live.
But this made us think.
It gave us this crazy idea.
Can we actually invert this process
and recover sound from video
by analyzing the tiny vibrations
that sound waves create in objects,
and essentially convert those
back into the sounds that produced them.
In this way, we can turn
everyday objects into microphones.
So that's exactly what we did.
So here's an empty bag of chips
that was lying on a table,
and we're going to turn that bag of chips
into a microphone
by filming it with a video camera
and analyzing the tiny motions
that sound waves create in it.
So here's the sound
that we played in the room.
(Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb")
And this is a high-speed video
we recorded of that bag of chips.
Again it's playing.
There's no chance you'll be able
to see anything going on in that video
just by looking at it,
but here's the sound we were able
to recover just by analyzing
the tiny motions in that video.
(Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb")
I call it -- Thank you.
(Applause)
I call it the visual microphone.
We actually extract audio signals
from video signals.
And just to give you a sense
of the scale of the motions here,
a pretty loud sound will cause
that bag of chips
to move less than a micrometer.
That's one thousandth of a millimeter.
That's how tiny the motions are
that we are now able to pull out
just by observing how light
bounces off objects
and gets recorded by our cameras.
We can recover sounds
from other objects, like plants.
(Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb")
And we can recover speech as well.
So here's a person speaking in a room.
Voice: Mary had a little lamb
whose fleece was white as snow,
and everywhere that Mary went,
that lamb was sure to go.
Michael Rubinstein: And here's
that speech again recovered
just from this video
of that same bag of chips.
Voice: Mary had a little lamb
whose fleece was white as snow,
and everywhere that Mary went,
that lamb was sure to go.
MR: We used "Mary Had a Little Lamb"
because those are said to be
the first words
that Thomas Edison spoke
into his phonograph in 1877.
It was one of the first
sound recording devices in history.
It basically directed the sounds
onto a diaphragm
that vibrated a needle that essentially
engraved the sound on tinfoil
that was wrapped around the cylinder.
Here's a demonstration of recording
and replaying sound
with Edison's phonograph.
(Video) Voice: Testing, testing,
one two three.
Mary had a little lamb
whose fleece was white as snow,
and everywhere that Mary went,
the lamb was sure to go.
Testing, testing, one two three.
Mary had a little lamb
whose fleece was white as snow,
and everywhere that Mary went,
the lamb was sure to go.
MR: And now, 137 years later,
we're able to get sound
in pretty much similar quality
but by just watching objects
vibrate to sound with cameras,
and we can even do that when the camera
is 15 feet away from the object,
behind soundproof glass.
So this is the sound that we were able
to recover in that case.
Voice: Mary had a little lamb
whose fleece was white as snow,
and everywhere that Mary went,
the lamb was sure to go.
MR: And of course, surveillance is
the first application that comes to mind.
(Laughter)
But it might actually be useful
for other things as well.
Maybe in the future,
we'll be able to use it, for example,
to recover sound across space,
because sound can't travel
in space, but light can.
We've only just begun exploring
other possible uses
for this new technology.
It lets us see physical processes
that we know are there
but that we've never been able
to see with our own eyes until now.
This is our team.
Everything I showed you today
is a result of a collaboration
with this great group
of people you see here,
and I encourage you and welcome you
to check out our website,
try it out yourself,
and join us in exploring
this world of tiny motions.
Thank you.
(Applause)