Visual Microphone Turns Video into Sound

You are here

Inside Signal Processing Newsletter Home Page

Top Reasons to Join SPS Today!

1. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
2. Signal Processing Digital Library*
3. Inside Signal Processing Newsletter
4. SPS Resource Center
5. Career advancement & recognition
6. Discounts on conferences and publications
7. Professional networking
8. Communities for students, young professionals, and women
9. Volunteer opportunities
10. Coming soon! PDH/CEU credits
Click here to learn more.

News and Resources for Members of the IEEE Signal Processing Society

Visual Microphone Turns Video into Sound

Researchers from MIT, Microsoft and Adobe have developed a "visual microphone" that can recover audio signals from vibrations of objects in a video. "When sound hits an object, it causes the object to vibrate," said Abe Davis, a Ph.D. candiate at MIT and first author of the new paper [1]. "The motion of this vibration creates a very subtle visual signal that's usually invisible to the naked eye. People didn't realize that this information was there." Using just a high-speed camera that records thousands of frames per second (fps), the system was able to reconstruct music from the leaves of a potted plant, and speech from a potato chip bag. Furthermore, the team has shown that sound can also be recovered using regular consumer cameras by taking advantage of the "rolling-shutter" effect. Visit "The Visual Microphone" project webpage  for more details. [1] Davis, Abe, Michael Rubinstein, Neal Wadhwa, Gautham J. Mysore, Frédo Durand, and William T. Freeman. "The visual microphone: passive recovery of sound from video." ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 33, no. 4 (2014): 79.

Open Calls

Nomination/Position Deadline
Call For Industry Short Course Proposals is Open 15 June 2025
Clone of Call for Nominations: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM) Editor-in-Chief 15 June 2025
Call for Nominations: IEEE Medals & Recognitions 15 June 2025
Clone of Call For Industry Short Course Proposals is Open 15 June 2025
Call for Papers for IEEE JSTSP Special Series on Artificial Intelligence for Smart Agriculture 15 June 2025
Call for Nominations: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM) Editor-in-Chief 15 June 2025
Clone of Call for Nominations: Fellow Evaluation Committee Member Positions 20 June 2025
Call for Nominations: Fellow Evaluation Committee Member Positions 20 June 2025
2025 IEEE SPS Scholarship Program Now Open! 30 June 2025
Call for Papers IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (JSTSP) Special Series on AI in Signal & Data Science -- Toward Large Language Model (LLM) Theory and Applications (Update) 1 July 2025
ICASSP 2026 Call for Satellite Workshops 9 July 2025
Clone of Call for Nominations for Chair, Women in Signal Processing (WISP) 14 July 2025
Call for Nominations for Chair, Scholarship Committee 14 July 2025
Call for Nominations for Chair, Women in Signal Processing (WISP) 14 July 2025
Clone of Call for Nominations for Chair, Scholarship Committee 14 July 2025
Clone of Nominate a Colleague for a 2025 IEEE Signal Processing Society Award 1 September 2025
Nominate a Colleague for a 2025 IEEE Signal Processing Society Award 1 September 2025
Call for Mentors: 2025 IEEE SPS SigMA Program - Signal Processing Mentorship Academy 14 September 2025

SPS Social Media

IEEE SPS Educational Resources

IEEE SPS Resource Center

IEEE SPS YouTube Channel