FeaturePrint®
Securing TrustTM by
Connecting Physical to Digital
Pick up a car brake pad, a circuit board, a bar of precious metal, or your collectable baseball card. Are you sure it is what you think it is? Is it what it should be? What is the consequence if it isn't?
Eliminate these questions and avoid the doubt. Be FeaturePrint sure!
Eliminate Counterfeits
Avoid Gray Markets
Trace your items
Stop Human Error
Everything is going digital,
but we still live in a
physical world.
How do you know that the item you are holding, buying, or installing, is in fact what it is supposed to be. Be it high consequence items like brakes, airbags, and pharmaceuticals, or high-priced items like collectables or high-end watches, no one is immune from this challenge. And with global counterfeits hitting at $3 trillion a year, it is only getting worse. What if you could fingerprint physical items?
Businesses lose trillions of dollars each year because individual items are not correctly identified. Even those with exotic labels, etchings, or handling procedures. With Alitheon, your products are reliably traced through simple image taking. With only a camera, our software can identify the inherent digital fingerprint that exists on every item. The true, irrefutable identity of each item is unlocked without any physical contact or alterations.
Using a photo, our FeaturePrint Optical AI software “sees” and converts the minute surface details of physical items into a unique mathematical identity. From gears and circuit boards to watches and collectables, no two objects are exactly the same, even though they may have just come out of the same production line.
High Level Value-Prop: With one image you can identify the ONE in a million and trace it. With one photograph you can say goodbye to counterfeits of your parts and products.
This is about machine vision and optical AI algorithms, not stickers, bar codes, QR codes, RFID, or etchings
Most of the world’s goods are either untraceable or only known through an identification proxy added to objects. Barcode labels, etchings, seals, exotic materials, are variously used to declare the provenance of individual items. They can also be lost, damaged, faked, changed, and manipulated.
Should an item’s proxy be lost – or never exist – the product is suddenly anonymous. Its performance, safety, or economic value is unprovable. In global B2B and B2C commerce, such failures cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually due to scrap, recalls, damage, and theft. Customer trust deteriorates with every loss.
This is more than cool tech. FeaturePrint is resilient in real-world conditions
Alitheon’s core registration and authentication functions are built to accommodate physical and environmental challenges of industrial scenarios. FeaturePrint handles:
• Obscured, damaged, or contaminated products
• Changing product orientations or rotation
• Processing batches of parts and parts in motion
• Versioning to support item-level audit histories
• Multiple components in assembly relationships
Ready to integrate with your smart platforms but does not need them to work and add value
Support your Web 3.0 or Industry 4.0 initiatives by linking your business to the products you make. Alitheon capabilities deploy quickly and fit your physical, cloud and data architectures:
• Manufacturing execution systems
• Blockchains for aftermarkets
• NFTs representing physical items
• Intelligent automation
• Distributed additive manufacturing
• Industrial IoT for production
PHARMA
Electronics
Packaging Cardboard
A Little Deeper on FeaturePrint
With 50 issued patents, 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. 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.
With FeaturePrint, proxies such as barcodes are unnecessary as we make the object its own identifier. FeaturePrinting enables accurate tracking on an assembly line and throughout distribution channels. It prevents counterfeiting not by detecting counterfeits but by identifying originals. It enables human biometrics with no possibility of profiling and creates the unbreakable object link that Blockchain needs to be secure and that smart contracts need to function.
At induction, unique random characteristics of the object are characterized and the resulting digital fingerprint – the FeaturePrint – is stored. At authentication, identification, or point of trace, a new FeaturePrint is extracted and compared with reference FeaturePrints to activate retrieval of the stored information or to determine that the object has or has not previously been seen.
FeaturePrint is insensitive to partial views and to degradation of the object between induction and authentication. This provides greater accuracy in object identification and authentication and allows continuous monitoring of objects as they change during manufacturing or become part of an assembly. It is insensitive to image distortions such as rotation, scale, off-axis viewing, and perspective.
FeaturePrint is not an image
A FeaturePrint 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.
FeaturePrint represents THE single object, not a class of objects
A FeaturePrint characterizes the specific object from which it was extracted, not the kind of object. It may, for example, represent a particular Intel Core i9 processor, not the class of all Intel Core i9’s. All class-based information is intentionally removed.
A FeaturePrint is not a proxy for authentication
Most identification systems today use proxies such as barcodes, QR codes, or RFID tags. These can be obscured, detach from the object, or themselves be counterfeited. By making the object its own identifier, Alitheon does not need them.
So what can you do with this technology?
With FeaturePrint, the item is its own proof, like a fingerprint is to a human, and thus you can authenticate items; you can identify specific items; you can track & trace individual items.