2D Boundary Asset Extractor for Privacy-Safe Remote Sharing
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current remote education, collaboration, and entertainment platforms lack the ability to analyze and protect user privacy by excluding the surrounding environment from being captured and shared, which is essential for maintaining personal space during remote sessions.
Innovation Solution
A writing/drawing-to-digital asset extractor system that uses an off-the-shelf RGB camera to capture and extract 2-D physical sketches and text from a surface, ensuring 100% privacy by maintaining the 3-D position and orientation invariance, correcting for distortions and lighting issues, and sharing high-quality content without capturing the surrounding environment.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If a standard RGB camera is used to capture the workspace for remote sharing, then the system complexity is reduced and ease of operation is improved, but the surrounding environment is captured along with the work product, compromising user privacy
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts only the work product from the captured image by detecting the 2-D boundary (paper, canvas, or digital display) and isolating the visual content within that boundary. This extraction process removes the surrounding environment from the shared view, protecting user privacy while maintaining ease of operation with a standard camera
Solution Approach 2:
The captured image is segmented into the work product region (within the 2-D boundary) and the surrounding environment. The system processes only the relevant segment (work product) for sharing, while excluding the rest of the scene, thus resolving the privacy issue without requiring specialized camera hardware
2Loss of information
If the entire field of view is captured and shared, then complete visual information is provided for remote collaboration, but privacy is compromised by exposing the surrounding environment
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts the essential visual information (work product) from the full field of view by detecting the 2-D boundary and isolating content within it. This extraction maintains visual information quality for collaboration while removing privacy-compromising surrounding elements from the shared stream
3Device complexity
If a standard RGB camera is used without special setup, then device complexity and calibration requirements are reduced, but distortion and lighting issues affect the quality of extracted content
Solution Approach 1:
The system replaces complex mechanical calibration systems with computational image processing. Standard camera distortions and lighting variations are corrected through software algorithms that process the captured image, eliminating the need for specialized camera setups or manual calibration while maintaining high extraction quality
Data Source
AI summary
A system, apparatus, method and a computer readable storage medium for extracting an asset. The method captures a scene having a two-dimensional (2D) boundary in a field of view. The scene is analyzed to detect visual content on the 2D boundary. The visual content is extracted without capturing a visual field beyond the 2D boundary. The visual content is sent over a network interface for remote sharing.