US-based nonprofit Art Legacy Institute (ALI) has partnered with anti-counterfeiting technology firm Alitheon to help protect art against theft, fraud, and misattribution.
ALI was founded by ex-FBI art crime agent Ronnie Walker last year with a mission to eliminate fakes and forgeries from the art market. Later this year, it will adopt Alitheon’s patented “FeaturePrint” technology—which is already being used to identify car and aerospace parts, precious metals, and watches, among other things—to track the provenance of artworks.
Alitheon’s tech uses “advanced machine vision algorithms” to convert various minute details of a physical item into a unique digital “fingerprint”—or a binary code—that can later be used to “irrefutably identify” that item. Roei Ganzarski, Alitheon’s CEO, told ARTnews all that’s required is one photo of an artwork taken with a smartphone camera “from about five inches away.” This simple usability, he said, sets Alitheon apart from other provenance tracking tech companies.