Super-resolution capacitive touchscreens

Abstract

Capacitive touchscreens are near-ubiquitous in today's touch-driven devices, such as smartphones and tablets. By using rows and columns of electrodes, specialized touch controllers are able to cap-ture a 2D image of capacitance at the surface of a screen. For over a decade, capacitive pixels have been around 4 millimeters in size - a surprisingly low resolution that precludes a wide range of inter-esting applications. In this paper, we show how super-resolution techniques, long used in felds such as biology and astronomy, can be applied to capacitive touchscreen data. By integrating data from many frames, our software-only process is able to resolve geomet-ric details fner than the original sensor resolution. This opens the door to passive tangibles with higher-density fducials and also recognition of every-day metal objects, such as keys and coins. We built several applications to illustrate the potential of our approach and report the fndings of a multipart evaluation.