Discover FeaturePrint
Transparency, Traceability, Trust
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!
Unique Identification
FeaturePrint acts like a fingerprint for objects. It is created by analyzing an object’s natural, random features, making it possible to distinguish even between seemingly identical items.
High Confidence Authentication
FeaturePrint offers an extremely high level of confidence in identifying and authenticating objects, far beyond traditional methods like barcodes or serial numbers.
Insensitivity to Variations
The technology remains effective even with partial views of an object, image distortions, or changes in the object’s condition over time, making it robust in various real-world scenarios.
Serialize Everything
FeaturePrint serializes every item registered, including those that you may not serialize yourself. That means you can trace, identify, and authenticate items at the individual level instead of just batches or lots.
What is FeaturePrint
What would you do
if you could fingerprint your products
FeaturePrint is an advanced machine-vision technology that provides for items, what fingerprints are for people – a unique and persistent identifier for the one in millions.
FeaturePrint serializes items. As such, it enables track & trace, eliminates counterfeits and gray markets, and reduces human error ….all with just a photo using a standard camera.
No bar codes, No QR codes, No stickers, No tags, No ‘invisible’ dust, No markers, No holograms, No special cameras, No special lighting, No Nonsense!
A unique identity for any physical object
FeaturePrint is our breakthrough optical AI technology that transforms any physical object into its own unique digital identifier. Unlike traditional methods like barcodes, labels, or serial numbers, FeaturePrint doesn’t rely on external proxies. Instead, it captures the object’s unique, natural, random inherent features, using just a standard off-the-shelf camera or even mobile phone.
Eliminate Counterfeits
Avoid Gray Markets
Stop Human Error
Trace your items
Our Value Simply Put
- Trace the Untraceable
- Protect Against Gray Markets
- Serialize All Products
Identify the ONE in a Million
Detect “Undetectable” Differences
Authenticate Products Instantly
Protect Against Counterfeits
Ensure Precise Traceability
This is about machine vision and optical AI algorithms
Proxies like barcodes or etchings for identification, can be lost, damaged, or counterfeited. Without these proxies, items become anonymous, making their performance, safety, or value unprovable. This leads to significant losses in global commerce due to scrap, recalls, damage, and theft, and erodes customer trust.
FeaturePrint technology eliminates the need for physical proxies by providing a unique digital fingerprint for each item.
No stickers
No bar codes
No QR codes
No RFID
No etching
No loss of safety, money or trust
Resilient in real-world conditions
Alitheon’s core registration and identification functions are built to accommodate physical and environmental challenges of real-world operational scenarios. This robustness ensures accurate performance despite factors like damage, obstructions, wear and tear, and more.
FeaturePrint handles :
Obscured, damaged, or contaminated products
Different 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 smart platforms but valuable on its own
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
Why I need it
Everything is going digital, but we still live in a physical world
In the global marketplace, many products rely on traditional identification methods such as barcodes, labels, and etchings, which can be lost, damaged, or counterfeited. This lack of reliable tracing and identification leads to significant issues including counterfeiting, inefficient supply chains, difficulties in managing product recalls and audits, financial losses, brand equity and trust.
Counterfeiting alone results in losses of approximately $3 trillion annually, further exacerbating these problems.
Harsh industrial environments, with their varying conditions, can undermine the effectiveness of conventional tracking technologies.
Unique Digital Fingerprints
FeaturePrint technology assigns a unique digital fingerprint to each item based on its intrinsic surface features. This ensures precise identification, even among similar items, without relying on traditional proxies.
Counterfeit Protection
FeaturePrint is designed to be immune to damage and counterfeiting. Unlike barcodes or labels, its digital fingerprint cannot be replicated or altered, providing a robust solution for maintaining product authenticity.
Harsh Environment Performance
Our technology excels in challenging conditions, such as varying orientations and environmental factors. FeaturePrint maintains high performance and accuracy in harsh industrial environments where traditional methods may fail.
Effective Tracing and Audits
FeaturePrint supports seamless tracing and detailed provenance and audit histories. This capability enhances among other things, the effectiveness of product recalls and audits, reduces inefficiencies, improves overall operational reliability, and creates trust.
No one is escaping this global problem
From fake pharmaceuticals to counterfeit #UL marks on batteries, from fake computer chips, to untraced parts going on aircraft, from fake gold dropped on the markets, to fake safety parts in nuclear reactors, this problem is growing on a regular and alarming pace.
The proliferation of counterfeit products, especially in critical sectors like pharmaceuticals and automotive parts, poses severe safety risks, leading to potential product failures and health hazards.
Counterfeiting undermines innovation and investment, as businesses face increased costs in combating fraud and suffer losses due to the spread of fake products.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Dilemma
Anti-counterfeiting strategies typically focus on two main areas: detecting counterfeits and making them harder to produce. If an item has features that are difficult to replicate, it should theoretically be easier for experts to identify fakes and assess defects.
Secure Supply Chain
A secure supply chain is crucial for preventing counterfeit items. The more complex the supply chain, the harder it is to ensure that counterfeit products are not introduced. Short and direct supply chains are more effective at maintaining security.
ID Tags and Proxies
Direct anti-counterfeiting efforts often involve adding ID tags such as barcodes, QR codes, or specialized labels. However, these tags can be counterfeited, removed, or damaged, reducing their effectiveness as security measures.
Hard-to-Duplicate Features
Adding complex features to an item to make counterfeiting more difficult is another common strategy. While this can deter some counterfeiters, it also raises costs and assumes that these features are impossible to duplicate, which is often not the case.
Cost and Effectiveness Issues
Features designed to be hard to replicate are expensive to produce. Additionally, the assumption that these features are impervious to duplication is increasingly challenged, as counterfeiters become more sophisticated and capable of replicating even complex features.
The Limitations of Traditional Methods
Traditional methods of anti-counterfeiting have limitations because they rely on the premise that any feature difficult to create will be equally hard to duplicate. Today, counterfeits can be nearly indistinguishable from originals, making these methods less effective.
Countering the Counterfeits
What is a Counterfeit?
The question of what constitutes a counterfeit object is subtle. The definition certainly includes illicit copies of genuine objects but goes far beyond that. Technically, counterfeit objects include “Canal Street” fakes or “knockoffs”, but those fool no one nor do they really intend to. Far more damaging in the consumer space are near-perfect copies of high-priced items and in the industrial space, illegal near match copies of high-consequence items from medicine to brake pads, to nuclear reactor parts.
Copies
This definition includes near-perfect copies sold as originals and unauthorized functional equivalents, which may lack proper content or capabilities. Examples include counterfeit drugs with insufficient ingredients or consumer-grade chips lacking the performance of military-grade versions. Some counterfeits may match the original's functionality but lack the associated research costs, warranties, and guarantees. Counterfeits made on the same assembly line or with similar equipment are particularly hard to detect, as standard methods fail to distinguish them from legitimate products due to their identical features.
Midnight runs
Authentic items manufactured illegally at the same manufacturing facility on the same equipment after the plant is supposedly closed for the night. Runs are made on the equipment to produce items not registered to the inventory of the company owning the IP. These items will not be detected by traditional anti-counterfeiting technologies because these are in fact authentic genuine products. They are simply made illegally without the company’s knowledge or approval.
Gray market
Authentic genuine products that are being sold against company policy or against the law. Examples include items that have passed their expiration date, that date is altered, and now are sold as in tact; items that have failed quality tests, are affixed a quality passed sticker, and now sold; used parts being sold as new; refurbished parts being sold as new; diverted parts from one sales region to another; and more.
Supply line mix-ups
Wrong items being substituted for correct ones. This can occur in manufacturing facilities, warehouses, distributions centers, and assembly lines. If multiple similar, but not identical parts are produced, and if they are not serialized, a human can be mistaken when they end up at the wrong location in the facility and be put into assemblies for which they were not designed, or shipped to wrong customers, etc. This can lead to bad performance and reliability, financial losses, and of course lost trust.
Multiple industries, one solution
At Alitheon we have developed some amazing technology that with a simple photograph is disrupting the world of physical authentication, identification, and traceability. We are the missing link connecting the physical world to the digital world.
Alitheon’s patented proprietary solution can supplant outdated, lower-tech solutions, and provide authenticity, identification, and traceability confidence to manufacturers, sellers, and consumers.
Automotive
Aerospace
Precious Metals
Luxury Goods
Government & Military
Collectibles & Art
Healthcare
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 and represents the one specific object from which it was extracted, not the ‘kind’ of object. Since it serializes everything that is registered, it may, for example, identify a particular Intel Core i9 processor, not just 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. Proxies can be damaged, obscured, removed, or themselves be counterfeited. By making the object its own identifier, Alitheon does not need any proxies.
So what can you do with this technology?
With FeaturePrint, the item is its own identifier, like a fingerprint is to a human. Thus you can serialize items, identify them, trace them, and authenticate them. What you can do with that type of data is endless.
Start to Finish in 3 Steps
Take a Picture
Just take a photo of your part, product, or item. Use a mobile phone or industrial camera.
No marking, changing, adding, or manipulating. No pixy dust, holograms, barcodes, tags or stickers. No x-ray, spectral imaging, 3D mapping, or infra red.
FeaturePrint
Our patented algorithms automatically identify and codify the unique attributes and features inherently existing on the item.
It then creates a one-of-a-kind FeaturePrint® (a 'digital fingerprint') that can be used for identification, authentication, and traceability.The ONE of millions. Just like your own fingerprint.
Identify, Authenticate, Trace
You, your customer, your distributer, your quality control, or anyone you choose, can take a picture of the item and identify it, authenticate it, and trace it. Simple.
No special scanners, readers, or tools. Just a camera. Even the one on your phone.