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

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.

Cite

Text

Ogren et al. "Visual Surface Wave Elastography: Revealing Subsurface Physical Properties via Visible Surface Waves." International Conference on Computer Vision, 2025.

Markdown

[Ogren et al. "Visual Surface Wave Elastography: Revealing Subsurface Physical Properties via Visible Surface Waves." International Conference on Computer Vision, 2025.](https://mlanthology.org/iccv/2025/ogren2025iccv-visual/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{ogren2025iccv-visual,
  title     = {{Visual Surface Wave Elastography: Revealing Subsurface Physical Properties via Visible Surface Waves}},
  author    = {Ogren, Alexander C. and Feng, Berthy T. and Ahn, Jihoon and Bouman, Katherine L. and Daraio, Chiara},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Computer Vision},
  year      = {2025},
  pages     = {26446-26455},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/iccv/2025/ogren2025iccv-visual/}
}