Eavesdropping On A New Level

[SEAWOLF97]

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Researchers from MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have shown that they can recover sound from video imagery, a technique that promises to pique the interest of intelligence agencies and forensic investigators. While the technique will need to be refined to be practical outside the laboratory, it has the potential to enable retroactive eavesdropping at events that were videoed with sufficient fidelity.

The technique "allows us to turn everyday objects -- a glass of water, a potted plant, a box of tissues, or a bag of chips -- into visual microphones," the paper explains. "Remarkably, it is possible to recover comprehensible speech and music in a room from just a video of a bag of chips."

http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data-analytics/eavesdropping-on-a-new-level/d/d-id/1297777

[1audiohack]

Weren't we doing that near the end of the Cold War by monitoring the vibrations of windows? It makes the leap to deriving audio from vibrating objects in videos an easy mental leap but in my mind only giving this a cursory glance, the video fidelity would have to be very high and so would the frame rate I would think to derive comprehensive speech.

Very interesting indeed.