# Visual Surface Wave Elastography: Revealing Subsurface Physical Properties via Visible Surface Waves

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09207 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09207/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Self-Supervised Video Forensics by Audio-Visual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01767/) (2023)
- [Sound Localization from Motion: Jointly Learning Sound Direction and Camera Rotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11329/) (2023)
- [Visual Vibration Tomography: Estimating Interior Material Properties from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02735/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Learning to See Inside Opaque Liquid Containers using Speckle Vibrometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20757/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.