Event Topology-based Visual Microphone for Amplitude and Frequency Reconstruction

Abstract: Accurate vibration measurement is vital for analyzing dynamic systems across science and engineering, yet noncontact methods often balance precision against practicality. Event cameras offer high-speed, low-light sensing, but existing approaches fail to recover vibration amplitude and frequency with sufficient accuracy. We present an event topology-based visual microphone that reconstructs vibrations directly from raw event streams without external illumination. By integrating the Mapper algorithm from topological data analysis with hierarchical density-based clustering, our framework captures the intrinsic structure of event data to recover both amplitude and frequency with high fidelity. Experiments demonstrate substantial improvements over prior methods and enable simultaneous recovery of multiple sound sources from a single event stream, advancing the frontier of passive, illumination-free vibration sensing.