MIT Research Amplifies Invisible Detail In Video 114
An anonymous reader writes "MIT researchers have invented an algorithm which is able to amplify motion in video that is invisible to the naked eye — such as the motion of blood pulsing through a person's face, or the breathing of an infant. The algorithm — which was invented almost by accident — could find applications in safety, medicine, surveillance, and other areas. 'The system is somewhat akin to the equalizer in a stereo sound system, which boosts some frequencies and cuts others, except that the pertinent frequency is the frequency of color changes in a sequence of video frames, not the frequency of an audio signal. The prototype of the software allows the user to specify the frequency range of interest and the degree of amplification. The software works in real time and displays both the original video and the altered version of the video, with changes magnified.'"
Oh fuck no! (Score:2, Informative)
could find applications in safety, medicine, surveillance, and other areas.
So instead of highlighting areas where something worth looking at is detected, this thing produces a highly distorted, exaggerated version of the motion, adding its own bias based on naive attribution of moving areas to distinct objects? Then a human won't see important details behind things that software deemed worthy of emphasizing -- you can just as well remove the humans from the process completely.
Re:Invented? (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't RTFA or watch the video (good /.er and Flash disabled, respectively)
If you click through to the article they have HTML5 videos served from YouTube there, so there is no need for Flash. Why Slashdot is still embedding videos as Flash is a mystery to me.
Re:Old (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, there's already a bloody iPhone app [apple.com]!
For the love of Pete!! Pulse oximetry [wikipedia.org] is not the same thing! Will ignorance ever tire of dismissively posting wildly inaccurate information to slashdot summaries??!!