Demonstrating ScreenshotMatcher: Taking Smartphone Photos to Capture Screenshots

Abstract

Taking screenshots is a common way of capturing screen content to share it with others or save it for later. Even though all major desktop operating systems come with a screenshot function, a lot of people also use smartphone cameras to photograph screen contents instead. While users see this method as faster and more convenient, image quality is significantly lower. This paper is a demonstration of ScreenshotMatcher, a system that allows for capturing a highfidelity screenshot by taking a smartphone photo of (part of) the screen. A smartphone application sends a photo of the screen region of interest to a program running on the PC which retrieves the corresponding screen region with a feature matching algorithm. The result is sent back to the smartphone. As phone and PC communicate via WiFi, ScreenshotMatcher can also be used together with any PC in the same network running the application – for example to capture screenshots from a colleague’s PC. Released as open-source code, ScreenshotMatcher may be used as a basis for applications and research prototypes that bridge the gap between PC and smartphone.