Eulerian video magnification: a review

Many important subtle changes in the environment are invisible to the naked human eyes. These subtle changes occur because of colour variations, such as blood flow in a human face that leads to face colour change, or motion variations, such as vena movement under human skin and vibration of buildings. The human eye requires optical microscopes to detect these variations. Alternatively, new technologies, such as high-speed imagery and computer processing, can be used to detect these variations. These computerised microscopes depend on computation rather than optical amplification to amplify subtle colour and motion changes in videos. The most popular technique to achieve computation-based microscope is the Eulerian video magnification (EVM). However, several challenges in EVM still need to be solved to meet the requirements of real time and video quality. This paper presents a comprehensive study of EVM methods and reviews the related literature. The strengths and drawbacks of existing works are discussed, and the important research fields and challenges in the area of EVM are concluded.