The present disclosure relates to a method for detecting touch points, and more particularly to a method for detecting touch points of multi-type objects.
Today, touch apparatus has been widely used for data input. With the development of science and technology, the touch means have been evolved from the single-touch manner to multi-touch manner. Today, in the multi-touch technology, various touch operations can be respectively executed by various objects having respective particular contact areas.
Many studies disclose a capacitive touch panel capable of being operated by both a pen tip and a finger tip. However, because the pen and finger have relatively large feedback energy variation therebetween while being touching on a touch panel, the finger touch may result in a relatively wide energy variation if this touch apparatus is particularly designed for pen input; and accordingly the accuracy and linear degree issues are brought in. Alternatively, the pen touch may result in a relatively narrow energy variation if this touch apparatus is particularly designed for finger input; and accordingly this touch apparatus is not so sensitive for the pen touch. In addition, even enhancing the energy variation by increasing the pen tip's area, the touch apparatus may not accurately determine the coordinate position of the pen tip due to the relatively large touch point.
An embodiment of the disclosure is to provide a method for detecting touch points of multi-type objects, which includes: detecting an energy variation below a first effective value; determining whether or not there existing a touch point according to the result obtained from the detection of the energy variation below the first effective value; referring, if there exists at least one touch point and one of the touch point(s) has an area size smaller than a first predetermined value, the touch point(s) having an area size smaller than the first predetermined value as a first-type touch point; referring, if there exists at least one touch point and one of the touch point(s) has an area size larger than a second predetermined value, the touch point(s) having an area size not smaller than the first predetermined value as a second-type touch point; detecting, if there exists the second-type touch point, the energy variation below a second effective value; and determining whether or not there truly existing the second-type touch point according to the result obtained from the detection of the energy variation below the second effective value. The second effective value is larger than the first effective value.
Another embodiment of the disclosure is to provide a method for detecting touch points of multi-type objects. The method is adapted to detect a touch apparatus whether or not being touched. The touch apparatus includes a plurality of touch sensing devices. The method for detecting touch points of multi-type objects includes: detecting the touch sensing devices and thereby obtaining a first basic detection result; processing the first basic detection result by a first magnification ratio and thereby obtaining a first scanning result; determining, if the first scanning result indicates that there exists no touch point having an area size larger than a predetermined value, the coordinate position of the touch point belonging to a first-type touch point according to the first scanning result; and executing, if the first scanning result indicates that there exists a touch point having an area size larger than the predetermined value, following operations: detecting the touch sensing devices and thereby obtaining a second basic detection result; processing the second basic detection result by a second magnification ratio and thereby obtaining a second scanning result; determining the coordinate position of the touch point belonging to the first-type touch point according to the first scanning result, and determining the coordinate position of the touch point belonging to the second-type touch point according to the second scanning result.
The present disclosure will become more readily apparent to those ordinarily skilled in the art after reviewing the following detailed description and accompanying drawings, in which:
The present disclosure will now be described more specifically with reference to the following embodiments. It is to be noted that the following descriptions of preferred embodiments of this disclosure are presented herein for purpose of illustration and description only. It is not intended to be exhaustive or to be limited to the precise form disclosed.
Specifically, if a touch, resulted by a pen tip, on a panel of a touch apparatus is assumed to have a maximum of 10 units of energy variation thereon in the scanning result and a touch resulted by a finger tip is assumed to have a maximum of 1000 units, the first effective value accordingly can be set to 10 units and this first effective value is referred to as the upper limit for the energy variation detection in this embodiment. In addition, an energy variation below a particular degree is regarded as a noise rather than being resulted from a touch; wherein the energy variation smaller than 5% of the first effective value is considered as a noise in this embodiment. In other words, any energy variation larger than 10 units is always referred as 10 units of energy variation in step S102, and any energy variation smaller than 0.5 unit (i.e., 5% of 10 units) is always referred as a non-touch status; therefore, the first effective value has an effective range from 0.5 to 10 in this embodiment.
Please refer to
In step S102, it is understood that there exists at least one energy variation located within the valid range of the first valid value (i.e., 0.5˜10 units) in the first scanning result if the touch pressure on the touch panel is larger than a threshold; in other words, any touch pressure larger than a threshold can result in at least one touch point on the touch panel. Alternatively, the touch apparatus is determined not being touched if there exists no any energy variation within the effective range of the first effective value (0.5˜10 units) in the first scanning result, and consequently the method in this embodiment shown in
As illustrated in
It is to be noted that, in this embodiment the two types of objects are distinguished by the first predetermined value only; however, the two can be distinguished by two different predetermined values. For example, in another embodiment, a touch point is determined as a first-type touch point (e.g., resulted from a pen) if having an area size smaller the first predetermined value and is determined as a second-type touch point (e.g., resulted from a finger) if having an area size larger a second predetermined value; wherein the second predetermined value is set larger than the first predetermined value thereby preventing the judgment confusion from occurring.
Then, the method sets an existence of the first-type touch point and obtains the coordinate position thereof (step S106) if the touch point has an area size smaller than the first predetermined value.
To those ordinarily skilled in the art, it is understood that the method in this embodiment can omit step S302 and directly set the first-type touch point detection flag as True; and accordingly, the method directly moves from step S104 to step S304 and then step S306. Thus, the method can have a benefit of one step less; but on the other side, the operation of writing True to the first-type touch point detection flag must be always executed without any condition.
Please refer to
Likewise, to those ordinarily skilled in the art it is understood that the method in this embodiment can omit step S402 and directly set the second-type touch point detection flag as True; and accordingly, the method directly moves from step S104 to step S404 and then step S110. Thus, the method can have a benefit of one step less; but on the other side, the operation of writing True to the second-type touch point detection flag must be always executed without any condition.
It is to be noted that, only the processes of setting the first-type and second-type touch point detection flags as True are mentioned in above-mentioned steps but without mentioning the processes of setting the first-type and second-type touch point detection flags as False, this is because the operation of setting the first-type and second-type touch point detection flags as False is not always necessarily executed in steps S106, S108. In an embodiment, the two flags can be set to False together with the execution of the scan operation in step S100, and then further processed in either step S106 or S108. Specifically, the first-type touch point detection flag is set to True in step S106 if there exists the first-type touch point; and the second-type touch point detection flag is set to True in step S108 if there exists the second-type touch point. Alternatively, the first-type touch point detection flag is set to False in step S106 if there exists no first-type touch point; and the second-type touch point detection flag is set to False in step S108 if there exists no second-type touch point. In another embodiment, the numbers of the first-type and second-type touch points are counted by a counter first, and the first-type and second-type touch point detection flags are then set either as True or False according to the aforementioned counting numbers.
Please refer to
To precisely calculate the coordinate position, the method performs the scanning operation again and thereby obtaining a second scanning result if there exists the second-type touch point in step S112 (step S114), and a processor (not shown) is configured to determine whether or not there substantially existing the second-type touch point according to the second scanning result obtained by the touch sensing devices (step S116); wherein, the process in this embodiment can determine whether or not the touch point exactly is a second-type touch point according to the information, such as touching area of each touch point, contained in the second scanning result. In other words, the step 112 may determine that there exists a second-type touch point; however, this second-type touch point may be regarded as a noise by the second scanning result, which is obtained by a scanning operation according to the second effective value in step S114, due to having relatively low energy therein, and accordingly the “touch point” existing in step S112 is not actually existed in this embodiment. In addition, the second-type touch point determined in previous may still have a relatively large area size in the second scanning result, and accordingly the object type of this second-type touch point can be further to be determined according to the second scanning result.
In one implementation mean, the method performs one scanning operation in step S100 and another scanning operation in step S114. Moreover, to those touch panels having an X-axis and Y-axis both capable of being supplied with scan signals, the first-time scanning operation can be realized by inputting signals from the X-axis and sequentially detecting signals from the Y-axis (or, inputting signals from the Y-axis and sequentially detecting signals from the X-axis) and the second-time scanning operation can be realized by inputting signals from the Y-axis and sequentially detecting signals from the X-axis (or, inputting signals from the X-axis and sequentially detecting signals from the Y-axis). Because the two scanning operations are performed in two different directions, different detection standards can be designed in this embodiment. For example, by setting different effective values or gain values (Gains), the energy variations can be adjusted to be more distinguishable.
In another implementation mean, the scanning result is adjusted by modulating (e.g., increasing) the first effective value. In other words, the energy data obtained by the scanning operation performed in the step S100 is still used as the fundamental measurement standard in the follow-up process; however, in this implementation mean, the first effective value (e.g., 10 units) is raised up to the second effective value (e.g., 1000 units) in step S114, accordingly the energy variation below 50 units (5% of the 1000 units) is regarded as a noise; wherein the corresponding energy variation distributions resulted from touches by using a finger and a pen based on the aforementioned second effective value are illustrated in
It is understood that the aforementioned embodiment can have some mobilizations in response to actual design requirements. For example, the method in this embodiment can omit steps S108, S112, for the determination of whether or not there existing the second-type touch point, by always executing steps S114, S116 for determining whether or not there existing the second-type touch point and consequently determining the coordinate position thereof. In addition, it is to be noted that the method in this embodiment may move to step S100, for another complete process of detecting touch point of multi-type objects, by the end of either step S112 or step S116.
It is understood, to those ordinarily skilled in the art, that the implementation of this embodiment may have some modifications. For example, in step S504, the method can first determine whether or not there existing touch points before the determination of whether or not there existing any touch point having an area size larger than the predetermined value; accordingly, the method directly moves to step S514, without the execution of steps S506˜S512, if there is no any touch point being detected. In another example, the obtainment of the first and second basic detection results can be realized by sensing the touch sensing devices in the same direction; or in two different directions as illustrated in the previous embodiment, that is, the first-time scan operation is performed by inputting signals from the X-axis and sequentially detecting signals from the Y-axis (or inputting signals from the Y-axis and sequentially detecting signals from the X-axis) and the second-time scan operation is performed by inputting signals from the Y-axis and sequentially detecting signals from the X-axis (or inputting signals from the X-axis and sequentially detecting signals from the Y-axis).
It is understood, to those ordinarily skilled in the art, that the technique provided in the present invention can be realized by various implementations under the same designing spirit; for brevity, no any unnecessary detail is given here.
Next, please refer to
As illustrated in
Then, the method reads the current scanning result (step S604). Specifically, the corresponding data is read from the first buffer if the current scanning result is stored therein; or, the corresponding data is read from a second buffer if the current scanning result is stored therein. After reading the data, the method determines whether or not there existing a pen-touch according to the read data (step S606). If there exists a pen-touch, the method sets a pen-touch detection flag to 1 or True (step S608); alternatively, the method sets the pen-touch detection flag to 0 or False if there exists no pen-touch (step S610). Likewise, the method determines whether or not there existing a finger-touch according to the data read in step 604 (step S612). If there exists a finger-touch, the method sets a finger-touch detection flag to 1 or True (step S614) and consequently sets to perform the finger-touch scanning operation (step S616); alternatively, the method sets the finger-touch detection flag to 0 or False if there exists no finger-touch (step S618) and consequently sets to perform the pen-touch scanning operation (step S620).
After the completion of step S616 or S620, the method performs the corresponding scanning operation and stores the scanning result in the second buffer (step S622). Afterwards, the method determines whether or not the pen-touch detection flag is 1 (step S624). If the pen-touch detection flag in step S624 is 1, the method determines the coordinate position of each pen-touch point by a particular touch point determination mechanism, such as a processor, according to the data read out from the first buffer (step S626). Once the pen-touch detection flag is determined to be 0 in step S624 or after the completion of step 626, the method determines whether or not the finger-touch detection flag is 1 (step S628) for the follow-up process according to the determination result.
If the finger-touch detection flag is determined to be 0 in step S628, the method directly outputs the touch point's coordinate position obtained in previous (step S630) and consequently moves to the END. Accordingly, the data previously stored in the second buffer in step S622 is used to replace the data read out in the next-round step S604; in other words, the operation of step S622 is equivalent to the operation of step S602 in the next-round process, and the buffer stored with the data obtained in the next-round S604 is the buffer associated with step 622 in this round.
If the finger-touch detection flag is determined to be 1 in step S628, the method reads out the current scanning data (step S632), that is, the method reads out the scanning result obtained in step S622. Then, the method performs another pen-touch scanning operation (step S634) and stores the obtained data. Afterwards, the method determines the coordinate position of each finger touch point according to the data read out in step S632 (step S636). After the obtainment of the coordinate position, the method outputs the coordinate position of the finger touch point as well as the coordinate position of the pen touch point obtained in previous (step S630). Accordingly, the data previously stored in the buffer in step S634 is used to replace the data read out in the next-round step S604; in other words, the operation of step S634 is equivalent to the operation of step S602 in the next-round process, and the buffer stored with the data obtained in the next-round S604 is the buffer associated with step 634 in this round.
In summary, through first scanning the first-type touch point and then selectively scanning the second-type touch point according to the data obtained from the scanning of the first-type touch point by using respective parameters, the present invention can determine the exact coordinate positions of touch points of multi-type objects. Moreover, because the scanning of the second-type touch point is selectively performed, the present disclosure can have power-saving feature by reducing the number of scanning under a particular condition.
While the disclosure has been described in terms of what is presently considered to be the most practical and preferred embodiments, it is to be understood that the disclosure needs not be limited to the disclosed embodiment. On the contrary, it is intended to cover various modifications and similar arrangements included within the spirit and scope of the appended claims which are to be accorded with the broadest interpretation so as to encompass all such modifications and similar structures.
Number | Date | Country | Kind |
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101132568 | Sep 2012 | TW | national |
This application is a continuation application of an application Ser. No. 13/795,007, filed on Mar. 12, 2013, now pending. The entirety of the above-mentioned patent application is hereby incorporated by reference herein and made a part of this specification.
Number | Date | Country | |
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Parent | 13795007 | Mar 2013 | US |
Child | 14797563 | US |