Touch Panel Control for Unintended Face Contact
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional methods for preventing unintended operations on touch panels, such as those in digital cameras, often limit the input range, reducing usability and failing to effectively differentiate between intended and unintended touches.
Innovation Solution
An electronic apparatus with a detection unit for touch operations and a control unit that sets valid and invalid operations based on predetermined movement conditions, allowing only valid touches to trigger processing while ignoring invalid ones, even if they occur simultaneously or sequentially.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If the touch panel operation is permitted over almost an entire surface to improve ease of operation, then the input range is enlarged, but unintended operations occur when the user's face touches the display during finder usage
Solution Approach 1:
The system preemptively identifies and flags potential unintended touches by detecting multiple simultaneous touch points. When a touch pattern matching the user's face (multiple contact points) is detected, the system pre-markers these as invalid operations before they can trigger unwanted actions, while still allowing legitimate single-point touches across the entire display area.
Solution Approach 2:
The system dynamically adjusts touch validation based on real-time detection of touch patterns. Instead of a static restriction of the input range, the system evaluates each touch event's characteristics (number of contact points, spatial distribution) and selectively validates or invalidates operations, maintaining full input range availability while preventing face-induced unintended operations.
2Reliability
If a region on the touch panel is limited to prevent unintended operations, then operation accuracy improves, but the input range is reduced
Solution Approach 1:
Instead of uniformly restricting the entire touch panel to a safe region, the system applies local validation rules to specific touch events. Each touch point is evaluated individually based on its characteristics, allowing different parts of the display to remain fully accessible while selectively preventing unintended operations only where face contact occurs.
Solution Approach 2:
The system changes the validation parameters dynamically based on touch characteristics rather than using a fixed spatial restriction. By monitoring parameters such as the number of simultaneous touch points and their spatial distribution, the system adapts its validation criteria to distinguish between intentional single-point touches and unintentional multi-point face contacts, maintaining full input range availability.
Data Source
AI summary
An electronic apparatus determines that only a first touch operation moved by a predetermined movement amount in a predetermined time period is a valid operation, and determines that another touch operation is an invalid operation, when a user captures an image while looking into a finder. Then, even when a movement amount by which the touch determined to be the valid operation once is moved in the predetermined time period falls below the predetermined movement amount, the electronic apparatus continuously determines that this touch is the valid operation. Even when a Touch-Up is performed regarding the touch determined to be the valid operation, the electronic apparatus continuously determines that the touch determined to be the invalid operation is the invalid operation.