Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

6-2026

Abstract

Hidden cameras have increasingly infiltrated hotel and Airbnb rooms, posing serious privacy risks. Detecting such cameras is challenging because they are visually inconspicuous and often embedded inside everyday objects. Even worse, existing handheld detectors are manual and also rely on single-angle illumination and hence suffer from high false-positive rates. We present SweepLED (pronounced "sweepled")1, a practical hidden camera detection system that operates on a commodity smartphone augmented with an unobtrusive LED-embedded case. SweepLED performs LED sweeping - a controlled sequence of multi-angle illumination - while the user simply holds the phone still by hand, enabling the camera to capture how reflections evolve under changing lighting. This reveals stable, lens-specific cues that distinguish hidden camera lenses from ordinary reflective objects, enabling robust detection with low user effort. We implement SweepLED using a compact hardware add-on and evaluate it in realistic environments containing 12 hidden-camera objects and 18 commonly reflective non-camera items. Our results demonstrate that SweepLED provides accurate and reliable hidden-camera detection using only unobtrusive smartphone-compatible hardware, achieving approximately 94% detection accuracy with a sweep time of under 5 s and a core component cost of less than USD $7.

Keywords

hidden camera detection, privacy, smartphone

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

MobiSys '26: Proceedings of the 24th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, Cambridge, UK, June 21-25

First Page

750

Last Page

765

ISBN

9798400720277

Identifier

10.1145/3745756.3809236

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3745756.3809236

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