Clever new LED lighting system thwarts unwanted smartphone photography

In a world in which virtually everyone carries a high-quality camera with them in the form of a smartphone, enforcing “no photography” rules — for copyright or privacy reasons — is next to impossible. That’s a problem researchers at the University of California San Diego and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have attempted to solve with a new project. To do so, they’ve created a smart LED system, which produces a flickering pattern that interferes with the camera sensor on mobile devices. “We developed LiShield, a smart LED ‘light shield’ which deters illegal photography of sensitive physical objects, such as people, museum art, or documents, and automatically enforces the visual privacy protection without any user intervention,” Shilin Zhu, one of the researchers on the project, told Digital Trends.