Protecting Against Screenshots: An Image Processing Approach

Alex Yong-Sang Chia, Udana Bandara, Xiangyu Wang, Hiromi Hirano; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015, pp. 1437-1445

Abstract


Motivated by reasons related to data security and privacy, we propose a method to limit meaningful visual contents of a display from being captured by screenshots. Traditional methods take a system architectural approach to protect against screenshots. We depart from this framework, and instead exploit image processing techniques to distort visual data of a display and present the distorted data to the viewer. Given that a screenshot captures distorted visual contents, it yields limited useful data. We exploit the human visual system to empower viewers to automatically and mentally recover the distorted contents into a meaningful form in real-time. Towards this end, we leverage on findings from psychological studies which show that blending of visual information from recent and current fixations enables human to form meaningful representation of a scene. We model this blending of information by an additive process, and exploit this to design a visual contents distortion algorithm that supports real-time contents recovery by the human visual system. Our experiments and user study demonstrate the feasibility of our method to allow viewers to readily interpret visual contents of a display, while limiting meaningful contents from being captured by screenshots.

Related Material


[pdf]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Chia_2015_CVPR,
author = {Yong-Sang Chia, Alex and Bandara, Udana and Wang, Xiangyu and Hirano, Hiromi},
title = {Protecting Against Screenshots: An Image Processing Approach},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
month = {June},
year = {2015}
}