Patent ID: 9582714
Date: 2017-02-28
CPC Classifications: B07C,G06F,G06K,G06Q,G06T,H04L

Claim:
1. A method for tracking a physical object comprising the steps of: acquiring digital image data of an image of at least a portion of a physical object; identifying a class of objects to which the physical object belongs; accessing a stored feature template associated with the identified class of objects, wherein the feature template defines a first authentication region and defines at least one feature located within the first authentication region; analyzing the image data to form a digital fingerprint of the object, wherein the digital fingerprint is responsive to natural structure of the object at least in that, first, it does not rely upon or require any labels, tags, integrated materials, unique identification characters, codes or other items that were added to the object specifically for the purpose of identification, and second, the digital fingerprint does not include text or symbols recognized from the image data; and wherein analyzing the image data includes— selecting a subset of the image data corresponding to the authentication region defined by the feature template; locating the at least one feature located within the first authentication region; for each feature, extracting at least one feature vector, the feature vector comprising an array of numeric values based on a portion of the image data corresponding to the feature; combining the extracted feature vectors to form the digital fingerprint, without including in the fingerprint any text or symbols recognized from the image data and storing the digital fingerprint in a database record.