Abstract
This work explores vibration-based sensing to determine the location of a touch on extended surface areas as well as identify the object touching the surface leveraging a single sensor. It supports a broad array of applications through either passive or active sensing using only a single sensor. In the passive sensing, the received vibration signals are determined by the location of the touch impact. This allows location discrimination of touches precise enough to enable emerging applications such as virtual keyboards on ubiquitous surfaces for mobile devices. Moreover, in the active mode, the received vibration signals carry richer information of the touching object's characteristics (e.g., weight, size, location and material). This further enables our work to match the signals to the trained profiles and allows it to differentiate personal objects in contact with any surface. We evaluated extensively in the use cases of localizing touches (i.e., virtual keyboards), object localization and identification. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed vibration-based solution can achieve high accuracy, over 95%, in all these use cases.