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Camcorder recording voice without microphone

14.06.2013

Using a high-speed camera that captures thousands of frames per second, the Japanese managed to record even the smallest vibrations in the surface of the skin of a person's face and neck, which are accompanied by sounds emanating from the human vocal cords.

There are various programs in the world that are widely used by all kinds of special services and law enforcement agencies, which, by the movements of the lips, jaws and muscles of a person’s face, can recognize the words that this person pronounces. The most complex programs can recognize human speech in various languages, but in any case, a computer can correctly reproduce only words, pure text, which does not include any intonations and emotional components, with some degree of probability.

Using a high-speed camera capable of capturing thousands of frames per second, researchers at Waseda University in Tokyo in Tokyo have been able to record even the smallest vibrations in the surface of the skin of a person's face and neck, which accompany sounds emanating from a person's vocal cords. After shooting, a specialized computer program, based on the most complex algorithms, turned the recorded skin vibrations into the corresponding sound vibrations, into a human voice.

“With our technology, we can get not only the words spoken by a person, but also his voice with intonations that carry the emotional component of speech,” said Yasuhiro Oikawa, head of the scientific group, speaking at the International Congress on Acoustics (International Congress on Acoustics), held in early June in Tokyo.

Using high-speed filming technology, the researchers recorded two volunteer participants saying the same word in Japanese. The camera shot at a frequency of 10 frames per second (for comparison, in a regular video, shooting at a frequency of 24 frames per second is used, and especially high-quality video is shot at a frequency of 60-80 frames per second). In addition, the voice of the volunteers was recorded using a conventional microphone, and the vibrations of the skin of their face and throat were recorded using vibrometer sensors.

After the computer program produced a sequence of sound vibrations calculated from visual data, the researchers compared them with real data recorded using a microphone and vibrometers. It turned out that the calculated sounds coincided with the real sounds, differing only in minor details. By playing the resulting sound file, the researchers were able to quite clearly recognize individual spoken words and identify voice intonations.

The technology of human speech and voice reconstruction using a high-speed camera is still in the experimental stage, only proving the efficiency of the idea itself. Until the end of this year, the researchers plan to bring this technology to a level where it can work in real time, recognizing and reproducing not only short words, phrases, but also long enough sentences. To do this, the researchers are going to seriously rework the software of the system and implement the function of analyzing the surface vibrations of the skin of some other parts of the human face, for example, the cheeks, which will provide them with more information that allows them to better reconstruct the speech, voice and intonations of a person.

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