Title: Touchware: a software-based technique for high-resolution multi-touch sensing devices

Authors: Xiaoling Wu; Hoon Heo; Guangcong Liu; Bangwon Lee; Jianjun Li; Lei Shu; Xiaobo Zhang; Sungyoung Lee

Addresses: Guangzhou Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nansha district, Guangzhou 511458, China ' Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co., LTD, Suwon 443-743, Korea ' Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China ' ATLab Inc., Yongin city 449-846, Korea ' Guangzhou Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nansha district, Guangzhou 511458, China ' College of Electronic Information and Computer, Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology, 525000, China ' Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China ' Department of Computer Engineering, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Gyeonggi-do 446-701, Korea

Abstract: Finger pointing on touch screens is a very natural way of human computer interaction. However, for many capacitive touch sensing devices, it may suffer from the nature of direct input since the size of human fingers and the lack of sensing precision make absolute positioning on touch screen difficult, especially on multi-touch sensing devices. Even if high-resolution/precision multi-touch devices become popular in the market, the cost is high and the positioning algorithm is not a flexible module. In this paper, we present Touchware, a software-based technique to overcome these limitations with low cost and to provide support for the development of multi-touch applications for rich input modalities. We introduce the maxima-based clustering algorithm and weight-based geometric algorithm for accurate finger positioning and first-contact-based decision with sniper for ghost pattern elimination. We evaluated the performance and show how the techniques can be successfully used for single-touch and multi-touch applications.

Keywords: multi-touch sensing devices; touch screens; absolute positioning; high-resolution sensing devices; human-computer interaction; HCI; maxima-based clustering; weight-based geometric algorithm; accurate positioning; finger positioning; first-contact-based decision; ghost pattern elimination.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2014.065154

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2014 Vol.17 No.1, pp.18 - 30

Received: 10 Nov 2012
Accepted: 10 Jun 2013

Published online: 15 Oct 2014 *

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