Researchers from the National University of Singapore and South Korea's Yonsei University have created a mobile application that will use the Time-of-Flight sensor on smartphones to find small hidden cameras, which are usually inserted into certain objects to peek or spy on.
From a number of tests, the application seems to be very effective at detecting hidden cameras than camera detection tools that are currently sold in the market such as the CC308 Plus or K18. It can even find cameras that may not be visible to the human eye at all.
How This App Works
Small cameras are usually hidden in certain sensitive locations, such as hotel rooms, bathrooms, changing rooms and so on, and this has caused quite a serious problem.
Hidden cameras are also easy to buy anywhere, especially in online stores. Because of its small size, this camera is very difficult to find with the naked eye, especially in a room that contains a lot of objects or furniture.
These researchers also have a mission to be able to create a more effective method of detecting hidden cameras which eventually resulted in an application they named LAPD, Laser Assisted Photography Detection. This application can be used on all types of smartphones that have a ToF sensor. They have even tested it on the Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus , S20 Ultra 5G and Note 10 Plus smartphones .
“When scanning, the ToF sensor will send out laser waves and receive light reflected by the target object, such as a camera hidden in a drink bottle and its surroundings. In particular, hidden cameras embedded in objects will reflect incoming laser waves at a higher intensity than their surroundings, due to an effect called lens sensor retro reflection.
This occurs when nearly all of the light energy hitting an object is reflected back to the source. This unexpected high-intensity reflection from this hidden camera will cause certain parts of the ToF sensor to become 'saturated' and appear as black pixels.
The LAPD application then processes this saturated area to automatically identify hidden cameras and their locations, then displays them on the user's smartphone screen," the researchers said.
In order to eliminate false positives due to the different reflectivity of various objects, the different capabilities of the ToF sensor as well as certain limitations of the optical properties of the reflection, the researchers used augmented reality to guide the user to move closer to and away from the object and various filters.
The researchers also plan to make this application open source, so that others will be able to help make it better, and then release it to the public, so that users who have a ToF sensor on their smartphone, can detect hidden cameras that are spying on them.
