Mobile Product Authentication for Instant Results

Product authentication is a very important subject due to the ever-increasing number of counterfeits today. There are dozens of technologies around, all having different strengths, weaknesses, and usages. In this article I will look at Mobile Product Authentication and highlight its 5 biggest advantages:

• Decreased false positive and false negative risks
• Much less training
• For End-Users
• Evolution over time
• Instant Statistics

Mobile Product Authentication decreases false positive and false negative risks

Humans are frequently unable to distinguish authentic from fake products, leading to the development of technologies like Holograms, OVI …etc. Putting product authentication responsibility in the hands of a human being makes it less reliable. How do you know if you are seeing a genuine hologram or not? This leads to a high false positive risk. There have even been cases where the fake product featured a hologram which was not present on the real product and got higher sales than the authentic product. Machines are much more reliable and can easily authenticate security features. Mobile Product Authentication makes the authentication process much more reliable thanks to the use of the smartphone. When people learn to use their mobile phone to assess the authenticity of a product; this risk disappears.

Mobile Product Authentication requires much less training

For a security feature to be effective, it must be exceedingly difficult and complex to reproduce. This is generally the case for covert security features, but not for overt features. If the overt security feature is extraordinarily complex, then it will be much too difficult for the user to authenticate with the naked eye. Nevertheless, it has to be complex enough not to be too easily copied. A covert feature cannot be authenticated with the naked eye by design. However, detecting it with the proper device is quite easy and requires no specific training. Mobile Product Authentication makes the authentication process much easier thanks to the use of a mobile authentication app installed on the smartphone.

Mobile Product Authentication is for End-Users

Nowadays, almost everybody has a smart phone. The ever-growing performance of mobile devices (e.g. CPU, optics, gyro sensors…etc.) enables mobile authentication apps to constantly expand feature detectability and keep pace with innovative bad guys as well as facilitating product authentication by non-experts. Mobile Product Authentication helps the use authenticated products and thus create a safer world by providing instant authentication via smartphone.

Mobile Product authentication is compatible with evolution over time

In the event that the security feature evolves or the algorithm is updated – for instance if it utilizes deep learning – the mobile authentication application only has to be updated in a totally transparent way for the user. This is of course only possible if the feature authenticated via smartphone is a covert one and not an overt one. In other words, Mobile Product Authentication is always up-to-date

Mobile Product Authentication enables instant Statistics

Authentication results can be uploaded to a remote server, enabling collection of statistics on the authentication solution usage and refinement of the anti-counterfeit strategy. Mobile Product Authentication will improve your brand protection strategy. As a conclusion, we predict that Mobile product authentication is the future of product authentication. Mobile anti-counterfeit solutions appear to be safer, easier to use, require no training and can evolve overtime while keeping the results safely stored in a central server. At AlpVision we provide effective Mobile Product Authentication solutions.