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Capture Resistant Environment

A camera-phone being blinded by a flashing light pattern to prevent it from taking a photograph. (Watch the video at the bottom of the page for more details.)
By out-fitting a camera with a ring of IR-LEDs and an IR pass filter, we are able to detect the retro-reflection caused by CCD imaging chips.

Here you can see the IR view of the scene as detected by our camera detector. Here is the post-processed image. We have located the camera-phone using simple image processing.

We use a standard desktop projector as our camera neutralizer. Camera view when it is allowed to take a photograph. (The camera neutralizer is running but is not actively blocking this camera.) Camera view when the camera neutralizer is active. We use a rotating color pattern to overwhelm the camera's auto exposure and white-balance algorithms, in addition to over-saturating the CCD to produce the best effect.

One potential application for a capture resistant environment is a trade show or corporate demo where it is desirable to have a product or literature on display, but disallow photographs.

Obviously, the camera to be neutralized must fall within the field of view of the camera detector and neutralizer. A wily opponent may attempt to take a photograph from outside the effective zone of protection. Physical barriers (tables, walls) or additional camera detectors and neutralizers can be deployed to combat such an angular attack.

Watch the Video Figure!

Read the Paper

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Jay's Homepage > > Research Interests > > Capture Resistant Environment