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; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025, pp. 26446-26455

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.

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[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} }