Potato-Chip Bag Can Help Spy On Private Conversations
WASHINGTON: Your potato chip bag can be used to eavesdrop on your private conversations!
Researchers at MIT, Microsoft and Adobe have developed an algorithm through which tiny vibrations on ordinary objects like a potato chip bag or a glass of water or even a plant can be reconstructed into intelligible speech.
In one set of experiments, the team was able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass.
Researchers also extracted useful audio signals from videos of aluminium foil, the surface of a glass of water, and even the leaves of a potted plant.
"When sound hits an object, it causes the object to vibrate," said Abe Davis, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and first author on the research paper.
"The motion of this vibration creates a very subtle visual signal that's usually invisible to the naked eye. People didn't realise that this information was there," said Davis.
