Category Archives: research

Finger Identification on Capacitive Touchscreens using Deep Learning

Touchscreens enable intuitive mobile interaction. However, touch input is limited to 2D touch locations which makes it challenging to provide shortcuts and secondary actions similar to hardware keyboards and mice. Previous work presented a wide range of approaches to provide secondary actions by identifying which finger touched the display. While these approaches are based on external sensors which are inconvenient, we use capacitive images from mobile touchscreens to investigate the feasibility of finger identification. We collected a dataset of low-resolution fingerprints and trained convolutional neural networks that classify touches from eight combinations of fingers. We focused on combinations that involve the thumb and index finger as these are mainly used for interaction. As a result, we achieved an accuracy of over 92% for a position-invariant differentiation between left and right thumbs. We evaluated the model and two use cases that users find useful and intuitive. We publicly share our data set (CapFingerId) comprising 455,709 capacitive images of touches from each finger on a representative mutual capacitive touchscreen and our models to enable future work using and improving them.

Huy Viet Le, Sven Mayer, and Niels Henze. 2019. Investigating the Feasibility of Finger Identification on Capacitive Touchscreens using Deep Learning. In 24th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI ’19), March 17–20, 2019, Marina del Ray, CA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3301275.3302295

Papers accepted at CHI 2018

Papers on Estimating Finger Orientation and Reducing Latency using Machine Learning

We will present two papers at the International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces. For both papers, we trained models that to improve the interaction with smartphones. PredicTouch is a system to reduce touchscreen latency using neural networks and inertial measurement units. With the second paper, we provide a ground truth data set for to estimate finger orientations using capacitive touchscreens recorded with a high-precision motion capture system. Using the data set, we show that a convolutional neural network can outperform approaches proposed in previous work.

CHI 2015 Videos

Modeling Distant Pointing for Compensating Systematic Displacements

Video for our CHI 2015 paper “Modeling Distant Pointing for Compensating Systematic Displacements”, written by Sven Mayer, Katrin Wolf, Stefan Schneegass and Niels Henze.

Subjective and Objective Effects of Tablet’s Pixel Density

Video for our CHI 2015 paper “Subjective and Objective Effects of Tablet’s Pixel Density”, written by Lars Lischke, Sven Mayer, Katrin Wolf, Alireza Sahami Shirazi and Niels Henze.

Text Entry on Tiny QWERTY Soft Keyboards

Video for our CHI 2015 paper “Text Entry on Tiny QWERTY Soft Keyboards” written by Luis A. Leiva, Alireza Sahami, Alejandro Catala, Niels Henze and Albrecht Schmidt from the Universitat Politècnica de València and the University of Stuttgart.

Investigation of Material Properties for Thermal Imaging-Based Interaction

Video for our CHI 2015 paper “Investigation of Material Properties for Thermal Imaging-Based Interaction”, written by Yomna Abdelrahman, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Niels Henze and Albrecht Schmidt.

Why Android is so Awesome – for Prototypes and Research

Smartphones currently become the most pervasive computing devices of all times. They currently become even the best-selling consumer electronic devices of all. Obviously there is a huge amount of research that investigates how people use their phones and how we can improve their experience. If doing research using smartphones, an important practical question is which platform one should choose. Basically, there are three major platforms left and alive: iOS on the iPhone, Windows Phone, and Android.

Developing

Developing for Android is nice but developing for the other platforms isn’t worse. While Java might not be the most innovative language it easily beats iOS’s Objective C (garbage collection anyone?) and is almost on par with the .NET languages (and you could also use one of the other JVM languages). What makes Java compelling is the huge number of available examples but what really sticks out (for us) is that all our computer science students have to learn Java in the first semester. This means that every single, somewhat capable, student knows how to program Java that is even used throughout their university courses. It also comes in handy (actually this is already a real show stopper) that unlike developing for iOS you don’t need a Mac and unlike Windows Phone you don’t need Windows. Linux, Windows, MacOS – yes they can all be used to develop for Android (and those who like the pain can also use BSD).

Openness

Android is free and open. Sure, it is probably free like beer and not like free speech but you can still look into the code. Being able to look into your OS’s source code might seem like an academic detail… One of my former students had to look into the Android’s sources to understand the memory management for developing commercial apps. Having the source code enabled us to understand the Android keyboard and reuse it during our studies. We even patched Android to develop handheld Augmented Reality prototypes. All this is only possible if you have the source code available. For these examples, it might not be necessary to look in the code on other platform. Still, at one point or another you might want to dig down to the hardware level and you are screwed if it isn’t Android that you have to dig through.

Deploying

While developing prototypes and conducting lab studies is nice at one point or another you might want to deploy your shiny research prototype. It might be for research, it might be for fun, or just for the money. Deploying your app in the Android market takes just seconds (if you already have those screenshots and descriptions readily available). There is no approval process. No two weeks waiting until Apple decides that your buggy prototype is – just a too buggy prototype. All you need is 25$ and a credit card (and a Google Account and a soul to sell).

Market share

Windows Phone will certainly increase its market share by some 100% soon – which isn’t difficult if you start from 0.5%. However, Android overturned all other platforms, including iOS and Blackberry. The biggest smartphone manufacturer is Samsung with their Android phones. They sell more smartphones than Nokia and they sell more smartphones than Apple. Well, and they are not the only company with an Android phone in their portfolio.

Fragmentation

Fragmentation is horrible! I developed for Windows Mobile and for JavaME. Even simple applications need to be tested on different devices to hope that it works. Things aren’t too bad for Android (if you don’t use the camera or some sensors or recent APIs or some other unimportant things…). Fragmentation can even be great for the average mobile HCI researcher. Need a device with a big screen or with a small display? Fast processor, long battery life, TV out, or NFC? There is a device for that! There are very powerful and expensive devices (the ones you will use to test your awesome interface) but also very cheap ones for less than 80€ (that you can give to your nasty students).

Usability, UX, …

Android offers the best usability of all platforms ever – well probably not. Would I buy an Android phone for my mother? If money doesn’t count I would certainly prefer an iPhone. What would I recommend to my coolish step brother? Certainly a Windows Phone to impress the girls. But what would I recommend to my students? There is nothing but Android!

Large-scale analysis of mobile text entry

There will be one billion smartphone users in 2013 and most of them will need some sort of text entry. To help people to enter text on mobile devices we aimed at studying how people type with a large number of participants. Therefore, we developed a typing game that records how users touch on the standard Android keyboard to investigate users’ typing behaviour. We published the typing game Type It! on the Android Market. The game got installed by 72,945 players and enabled us to collect 47,770,625 keystrokes from around the world.

Using the data we identified three approaches to improve text entry on mobile phones. As we found a systematic skew in users’ touch distribution we derived a function that compensates this skew by shifting touch events. In addition, we changed the keys’ labels by shifting them upwards and visualize the position where users touch the keyboard. By updating the game we conducted an experiment that investigates the effect of the three approaches. Results based on 6,603,659 further keystrokes and 13,013 installations show that visualizing the touched positions using a simple dot decreases the error rate of the Android keyboard by 18.3% but also decreases the speed by 5.2% with no positive effect on learnability. The Android keyboard outperforms the control condition but the constructed shift function further improves the performance by 2.2% and decreases the error rate by 9.1%. We argue that the shift function can improve existing keyboards at no costs.

Our paper with the lengthy title ‘Observational and Experimental Investigation of Typing Behaviour using Virtual Keyboards on Mobile Devices‘ that describes our work has recently been accepted at CHI 2012.

Analysis of User Studies at MobileHCI 2011

Flying back from another conference I had a look at the MobileHCI 2011 proceedings. Having seen a lot of fantastic talks I don’t remember a single presentation where I thought that the paper shouldn’t have been accepted (in contrast to some talks at this year’s Interact, previous MobileHCI, and similar conferences). Anyway, just as for the MobileHCI 2010 proceedings I went through all short and long papers to derive some statistics.

18 short papers and 45 long papers (20 more papers than last year) have been accepted with a slightly increased acceptance rate of 22.8%. As I focussed on the subjects that participate in the conducted studies I excluded 6 papers from the analysis because they are systems papers (or similar) and do not contain a real study.

Number of Subjects

The average number of subjects per paper is M=1,969, SD=13,757. Removing the two outliers by Böhmer et al. (4,125 subjects) and our paper (103,932 subjects) the number of subjects is M=76.62, SD=159.84. The chart below shows the distribution of subjects per paper for the considered long and short papers.

Subjects’ gender

Not all papers report the subjects’ gender. If there are multiple studies in a paper and the gender is reported for one of the studies I still use the numbers. For the paper that report participants’ gender 28.28 (SD=49.07) are male and 21.84 (SD=49.26) are female. The chart below shows the number of males and females for short and long papers (error bars show the standard error).

A paired two-tailed t-test shows that there are significantly more male participants than female participants (p<.05, d=.13). The effect is also significant if only the long papers are considered (p<.01, d=.13) but not for the short papers (p=.54). The reason why the effect is not significant for short papers is The Hybrid Shopping List. Excluding this paper the effect is also significant for short papers (p<.01, d=0.68).

Subjects’ age

Not all papers report participants’ age in a consistent and complete way. Nonetheless, I tried my best to derive the age for all papers. The chart below shows the histogram for the 41 papers where I was able to derive the average age. The average for the considered papers is 27.46 years.

It is a bit difficult for me to understand why papers fail to report participants’ age and why the age is reported in so many different ways. Of course, the age might not always be seen as relevant and sometimes you just don’t know it. However, if the data is available it is so easy to provide a basic overview. Just report the age of the youngest and oldest participant along with the average age and the sample’s standard deviation. That even fits in a single line!

Subjects’ background

Getting a complete picture of the participants’ background is just impossible based on the papers alone. To many papers either report nothing about the participants’ background or only very specific aspects (e.g. ‘all participants are right handed’). Even using the sparse information it is clear to me that the fraction of students and colleagues that participate – both with a technical background – is much higher than their fraction of the population.

From my own experience I know that getting a nice sample for your study can cost a lot of resources and/or creativity. Thus, we often rely on ‘students and guys from the lab’ for our studies. IMHO it is often perfectly fine to use such a sample (e.g. when conducting a repeated-measures Fitts’ law experiment). Still I wonder if we optimize our research for this very particular target group and if this might be an issue for the field.

Discussion

I analysed the MobileHCI 2011 long and short papers to determine information about the subjects that participated in the respective studies. The number of subjects per paper is more than three times higher than 2010 even if we ignore the two outliers. One reason is that there are a few papers that contribute results from online questionnaires (or similar) that attracted some hundred participants. Even if we would also exclude these papers the sample size increased. Looking at participants’ gender we found a clear bias towards male participants. Compared to 2010, however, this bias got smaller. For 2010 we found 40.89% female participants while we found 43.57% for 2011. The age distribution shows that studies with elderlies are rare.

The data seems to support my impression that the quality is higher compared to last year. The sample size and the quality of the sample have both improved. Based on my subjective impression I also assume that the way demographics are reported improved compared to last year. Thus, I conclude that MobileHCI 2011 wasn’t only fantastic to attend but also provided a program with an outstanding quality.