Counterfeit and knock-off products can impact you in many ways. Suppose the pharmacy you get your medication from accidentally buys knock-off or counterfeit inventory. Would you really want to be driving in a car that has fake brake pads that were purchased by the body shop you use? App developer Alitheon has created FeaturePrint, an AI-based app that can spot counterfeits, fakes, and knock-offs by taking a single photo. And the app works with a wide variety of products.
Imagine using an app and a photo to verify the authenticity of different items
Even though the app uses your phone’s camera, FeaturePrint is not an image. “It is a set of numbers characterizing the unique features of an object. Features common to similar objects are rejected, and only the information that makes this object unique is preserved.” A FeaturePrint confirms a particular object, not the kind of object it is. For example, the app might confirm a certain Intel Core i9 processor, not the class of all Intel Core i9 processors.
The app is used by the London Bullion Market Association to identify and authenticate gold bars
As Alitheon says, “Alitheon’s FeaturePrint optical AI technology securely links the physical and digital worlds. A FeaturePrint is a digital representation of the inherent random features unique to an object that arise from the object’s creation. FeaturePrinting allows high confidence distinguishing of individual items out of millions of similar and so-called “identical” objects.”
As the developer points out, “Each FeaturePrint is unique, even between objects that have been made to be identical and manufactured in the same way, and thus appear identical to the human eye. It is to a solid object what a fingerprint is to a person, but with vastly more detail and associated with vastly higher recognition and authentication confidence. Of the plethora of various objects, we have FeaturePrinted and identified, we have never made a high-confidence mistake.”
