Comparison of high speed imaging technique to laser vibrometry for detection of vibration information from objects

The development of camera technology in recent years has made high speed imaging a reliable method in vibration and dynamic measurements. The passive recovery of vibration information from high speed video recordings was reported in several recent papers. A highly developed technique, involving decomposition of the input video into spatial subframes to compute local motion signals, allowed an accurate sound reconstruction. A simpler technique based on image matching for vibration measurement was also reported as efficient in extracting audio information from a silent high speed video. In this paper we investigate and discuss the sensitivity and the limitations of the high speed imaging technique for vibration detection in comparison to the well-established Doppler vibrometry technique. Experiments on the extension of the high speed imaging method to longer range applications are presented.