Accurate Combined Keystrokes Detection Using Acoustic Signals

Abstract

With the development of acoustic localization schemes using mobile devices, keystroke detection has received tremendous attention from the academia and industry. Currently, most of the existing systems focus on the recognition of a single keystroke and they are limited by several restrictions. In this paper, we consider the idea of signal variation caused by the combination of two combined keystrokes, and propose an acoustic-based scheme that can detect the combined keystrokes effectively. Our system exploits the blind signal separation technique to deal with the mixed signals, resultant from typing two separate keys simultaneously. Then, we apply feature extraction and pattern recognition algorithms to recognize the combined keystrokes. Extensive experiments have been conducted in a laboratory environment with mobile phones equipped with two microphones. Our results show that for several combinations of two keystrokes, on average, we can achieve 78.4% recognition accuracy.