We present Lift, a visible light-enabled finger tracking and object localization technique that allows users to perform freestyle multi-touch gestures on any object’s surface in an everyday environment. By projecting encoded visible patterns onto an object’s surface (e.g. paper, display, or table), and localizing the user’s fingers with light sensors, Lift offers users a richer interactive space than the device’s existing interfaces. Additionally, everyday objects can be augmented by attaching sensor units onto their surface to accept multi-touch gesture input. We also present two applications as a proof of concept. Finally, results from our experiments indicate that Lift can localize ten fingers simultaneously with accuracy of 0.9 mm and 1.8 mm on two axes respectively and an average refresh rate of 84 Hz with 16.7ms delay on WiFi and 12ms delay on serial, making gesture recognition on noninstrumented objects possible.

New technology comes about in a number of different ways. It may come from advances in scientific research, through new combinations of existing technology, or by simply from imagining what might be possible in the future. This video describes the evolution of Tabletop Telepresence, a system for remote collaboration through desktop videoconferencing combined with a digital desk. Tabletop Telepresence provides a means to share paper documents between remote desktops, interact with documents and request services (such as translation), and communicate with a remote person through a teleconference. It was made possible by combining advances in camera/projector technology that enable a fully functional digital desk, embodied telepresence in video conferencing and concept art that imagines future workstyles.

We present a novel system for detecting and capturing paper documents on a tabletop using a 4K video camera mounted overhead on pan-tilt servos. Our automated system first finds paper documents on a cluttered tabletop based on a text probability map, and then takes a sequence of high-resolution frames of the located document to reconstruct a high quality and fronto-parallel document page image. The quality of the resulting images enables OCR processing on the whole page. We performed a preliminary evaluation on a small set of 10 document pages and our proposed system achieved 98% accuracy with the open source Tesseract OCR engine.

Capturing book images is more convenient with a mobile phone camera than with more specialized flat-bed scanners or 3D capture devices. We built an application for the iPhone 4S that captures a sequence of hi-res (8 MP) images of a page spread as the user sweeps the device across the book. To do the 3D dewarping, we implemented two algorithms: optical flow (OF) and structure from motion (SfM). Making further use of the image sequence, we examined the potential of multi-frame OCR. Preliminary evaluation on a small set of data shows that OF and SfM had comparable OCR performance for both single-frame and multi-frame techniques, and that multi-frame was substantially better than single-frame. The computation time was much less for OF than for SfM.