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Monday, March 11, 2013

Motion Magnification


Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Hao-Yu Wu, have developed an algorithm to magnify tiny changes and motions. The result was a type of motion magnification they call 'Eulerian Video Magnification'. This is one case where a video is definitely worth a thousand words, so I’ll let author William Freeman shows us the possibilities:





As stated in the video, the algorithm can be used with any video, and computation time is only a few minutes. The code will be offered for free for non-commercial usage on the project web site. In conjunction with this, Quanta Research Cambridge has created a site where users can experiment with their own or provided videos. What else might the technology be used for? One suggestion was to use the algorithm in real time to detect a 'tell' in poker players. I’m sure you can think of even better uses.

Hat tip: Lindsey Muscato.


Wu, H., Rubinstein, M., Shih, E., Guttag, J., Durand, F., & Freeman, W. (2012). Eulerian video magnification for revealing subtle changes in the world ACM Transactions on Graphics, 31 (4), 1-8 DOI: 10.1145/2185520.2335416.




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