Imaging privacy threats from an ambient light sensor | Science Advances

Embedded sensors in smart devices pose privacy risks, often unintentionally leaking user information. We investigate how combining an ambient light sensor with a device display can capture an image of touch interaction without a camera. By displaying a known video sequence, we use the light sensor to capture reflected light intensity variations partially blocked by the touching hand, formulating an inverse problem similar to single-pixel imaging. Because of the sensors’ heavy quantization and low sensitivity, we propose an inversion algorithm involving an ℓ _p -norm dequantizer and a deep denoiser as natural image priors, to reconstruct images from the screen’s perspective. We demonstrate touch interactions and eavesdropping hand gestures on an off-the-shelf Android tablet. Despite limitations in resolution and speed, we aim to raise awareness of potential security/privacy threats induced by the combination of passive and active components in smart devices and promote the development of ways to mitigate them.