On Redirecting Documents with a Mobile Camera

This paper presents a method for facilitating document redirection in a physical environment via a mobile camera. With this method, a user is able to move documents among electronic devices, post a paper document to a selected public display, or make a printout of a white board with simple point-and-capture operations. More specifically, the user can move a document from its source to a destination by capturing a source image and a destination image in a consecutive order. The system uses SIFT (scale invariant feature transform) features of captured images to identify the devices a user is pointing to, and issues corresponding commands associated with the identified devices. Unlike RF/IR based remote controls, this method uses the visual features of an object as an always available identifier for many tasks, and therefore is easy to deploy. We present experiments on identifying three public displays and a document scanner in a conference room for evaluation