Smart privacy-preserving screen based on multiple sensor fusion

Privacy problems arise with the popular usage of personal devices with display screen, e.g., laptop, smart phone or pad, in public areas, one of which is the screen peeping. This paper proposes a smart privacy-preserving screen system that can detect someone else see the consumer´s screen and then protect the screen automatically and adaptively. It depends on multiple sensors, i.e., video camera module, ultrasonic distance module, light sensor module, to detect screen peeping, user distance and environmental lightness, and decide whether to adjust the screen´s lightness. With limited lightness or contrast, the screen can only be seen by the consumer, while others cannot watch the screen clearly. Especially, the screen peeping detection scheme is composed of several algorithms, i.e., eye detection, eye pair decision and person counting. Based on the video frames captured by the video camera module, the scheme will detect eyes in the video frame, decide the number of persons peeping at the private screen, and inform the smart screen to protect the screen by adjusting the light or contrast. With the smart phone as an example, various experiments are done and comparative results show that the proposed scheme obtains better performance than existing works and is a good solution for automatic screen privacy protection.