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The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video

Abe Davis's Research · demo · Watch on YouTube

Information theory & signal processingComputer vision, speech & NLPPrivacy, surveillance & cybercrime

What it is

MIT researchers show that sound can be recovered from silent video by analyzing tiny vibrations in objects such as a potato chip bag. It works even with consumer cameras by using rolling shutter.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN commenters cite it as the classic demonstration of audio recovery from video in surveillance and privacy discussions.

  • 1 people recommended it
  • 1 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2015, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “it can be possible to extract audio from video, by careful processing of the small motions the sound induced in objects in the frame”

    Recovering sound from tiny motions in video, even consumer cameras

    eesmith, 2017-12 · Recommendation · in “Prostitution cases dismissed because cops’ cameras mistakenly recorded audio”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: audio from video, mit csail, surveillance, vibrations, signal processing

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