Visual Surface Wave Elastography: Revealing Subsurface Physical Properties via Visible Surface Waves
Alexander C. Ogren, Berthy T. Feng, Jihoon Ahn, Katherine L. Bouman, Chiara Daraio
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.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{Ogren_2025_ICCV,
author = {Ogren, Alexander C. and Feng, Berthy T. and Ahn, Jihoon and Bouman, Katherine L. and Daraio, Chiara},
title = {Visual Surface Wave Elastography: Revealing Subsurface Physical Properties via Visible Surface Waves},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
month = {October},
year = {2025},
pages = {26446-26455}
}