Not all of us buy designer products, and the ones who do, they are not always familiar with the details. The art of creating counterfeit products has been perfected so well that even the most vigilant of us can be shammed. A startup from New York called Entrupy has developed a small handy scanner that checks and identifies fake designer products from real ones in seconds.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the global counterfeit industry is worth $460 billion. This industry thrives mostly on fake luxury goods from designer brands like Louis Vuitton or Channel. When the technology for imitating the technology got so good that human eye lost track of the real ones, technology was again brought in to catch the fraudulent products. The high-quality scanner from Entrupy uses deep learning methodology to check the authenticity of goods anywhere and anytime.
The high-tech Entrupy scanner works in coordination with your smartphone, capturing high-quality microscopic pictures of the material, processing, craft, and the product’s serial number. These images are then compared to others in a database that contains more than 30,000 designer bags from the most popular of the world’s brands. Clients upload more images of these products to the database to add to the accuracy. The company expanded its database to achieve an authentication accuracy rate of 98.5%.
Ashlesh Sharma, co-founder of the start-up, explained the details saying,
“Entrupy’s technology is a mix of machine learning and microscopy. We train our machine-learning algorithms to pick up data points from millions of microscopic images looking for qualities like texture, contrast, topology, geometric shapes, thread counts, minor manufacturing artifacts such as scratches in the hardware stamps, wear, and many more details that you wouldn’t be able to easily see. These details are in fed into our custom machine learning pipeline, allowing us to determine a product’s authenticity. “
Vidyuth Srinivasan, CEO of the company, said in another interview with CNBC,
“We have mapped significant parts of how, where and when authentic goods were made, so for fakers to beat the system, they need to use the exact same specs as the authentic goods made in the last 100 years. I wouldn’t completely rule it out, but it is incredibly hard.”
As of now, Entrupy limits itself to the identification of authentic designer bags. However, the same idea can be expanded to all kinds of products including electronics, cosmetics, fragrances, and what not. They have already tested it on some other products, and plan to expand the functionality very soon.
The Entrupy scanner and the smartphone app is not out for purchase. Instead, you can choose a monthly lease system that will cost you $99 a month for five scans, $399 for 30, and $999 for 100 scans. As each bag from a brand like Gucci or Channel costs thousands of dollars, this is not a lot!
It is an interesting option for the luxury goods industry to consider if they want to protect their industry from the counterfeit products.
