Can You Recover Sound From Images?

Is it possible to reconstruct sound from high-speed video images? Part of this video was sponsored by LastPass: http://bit.ly/2SmRQkk Special thanks to Dr. Abe Davis for revisiting his research with me: http://abedavis.com This video was based on research by Dr. Abe Davis and colleagues. I found out about this work years ago and was fascinated by the way he was able to capture vibration information in image-only video. I always imagined the motions of objects would be visible as when recording a tuning fork in slow motion - so deriving sound from high speed images seemed a feasible task. But the reality is much more difficult. Sound vibrations only cause objects to wiggle by about a micrometer. This is much smaller than a pixel, so the algorithm must understand the characteristics of the image. A move in one direction should cause some pixels to lighten slightly, while others darken - and this behavior is correlated along the edges of the image. So noise can be reduced because it s random over the image and there are enough places to sample that you can get it to cancel out. Something I m wondering now is - would it be possible to capture sound in a single image? I m thinking it would have to be an image of a large object or space because the wavelengths of typical sounds are quite long. Maybe a high frequency sound could be imaged in a suitable medium... Animations by Alan Chamberlain Music from http://epidemicsound.com "Seaweed"