Fake fashion products- we all hate them. Whether they be Louis Vuitton bags, Burberry coats, or YSL shoes, splurging a godforsaken amount of money on an item that we thought was 100% authentic only to find it was a dud is hundreds of dollars down the drain. The biggest problem is that we’re never too sure whether the item we’re buying is authentic or not. Sometimes, even the stores themselves have no idea that the items they were selling were fake. We’re not all fashion brand experts that can identify red flags hem by hem, stitch by stich, and pattern by pattern. It’s a constant struggle.
Source: Youtube, Entrupy
That is, until technology comes in to save the day. In come Entrupy Inc., a starup company founded by Ashlesh Sharma, an NYU doctoral graduate, Vidyuth Srinivasan and Professor Lakshminarayanan Subramanian. Together, they have created their new, self-titled product that can tell if your item is fake or not. It’s essentially a small microscope that you can connect to your smartphone, and literally all you have to do is scan your item and viola!
This non-invasive system of detecting counterfeit items not only works wonders, it also does it pretty fast, in about 15 seconds. This is because it uses a “dataset of three million images” and uses them as reference to distinguish fake fabrics, leather, pills, shoes, toys, and even electronics, from real ones.
“The underlying principle of our system stems from the idea that microscopic characteristics in a genuine product or a class of products-corresponding to the same larger product line-exhibit inherent similarities that can be used to distinguish these products from their corresponding counterfeit versions,” says co-founder Professor Subramanian.
Source: Entrupy
It’s also pretty good at its job as well. “The classification accuracy is more than 98 percent, and we show how our system works with a cellphone to verify the authenticity of everyday objects.” Not only is it portable and handy, it’s also extremely accurate!
The product currently retails for as low as $99 per month, and so far can detect counterfeit items from brands such as Hermès, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Céline, Goyard, Dior, Gucci, Fendi, Burberry, Balenciaga and Prada. For a product that’s aimed at business retailers who sell such products, that’s a pretty good deal!
Even if this product is still in its early beginnings, it can already test out quite a few high fashion brands. However, as the technology advances, they plan to have more brands added to the list, as well as expand to items outside the world of fashion. It’s only forward from her for the team behind Entrupy.
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