Tech giants have been stepping up their efforts to fight the counterfeit industry. In the wake of the lawsuit filed by Facebook and Gucci against a seller of fake Gucci products in late April, Alibaba has recently exposed its updated AI platform capable of recognizing counterfeit luxury items in 30-50 milliseconds, 10 times quicker than we blink.
The Turing Lab of the company built The AI platform containing a database of more than 1 million logos covering 500 luxury product categories, allegedly the world’s largest database of this kind.
Alibaba means the database to open to the scientific research teams for free. More than 20,000 teams were hired to “attack” the anti-counterfeiting algorithm. It has collected usual interference in trademark identification including noise disturbance, image blurring, trademark counterfeiting, and partial covering. Technical innovation are utilized to further protect intellectual property rights.
The AI anti-counterfeiting platform contains data from about 13.7 billion image samples, which is 186 times of the number of books stored in the National Library of China. Once discovering any product that is suspected to be counterfeit, the platform will block the product's link immediately with an accuracy of 96 percent, an engineer from the team who developed the platform introduced.
During the pandemic, the luxury clothing industry in China rose by a surprising 48 per cent ($54 billion) as Chinese consumers were unable to buy their goods from elsewhere amid travel restrictions.
Sales on Luxury Pavilion, a luxury app under Alibaba's Tmall e-commerce platform, rose 159 percent year-on-year from January to March this year, according to statistics from Tmall.
Along with the booming e-commerce industry there is rampant counterfeiting, especially given the profitability of live streaming shopping.
In March, police in Southwest China's Chongqing arrested several hosts of live streaming shopping who advertised counterfeit Gucci and Louis Vuitton products. The money involved in the case amounted to about 2 million yuan ($310,805).
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