Counterfeit goods cost businesses and consumers billions of dollars annually, with knock-offs increasingly difficult to identify. Spectroscopy can authenticate products by identifying embedded markers and substandard materials.
Counterfeiters will often use many of the same materials as major consumer goods manufacturers, and in at least some cases, utilize workers familiar with the same assembly and construction techniques that major manufacturers rely on.
This makes it challenging to spot the fakes, especially upon visual inspection alone. To help differentiate the branded products from reproductions, manufacturers are using optical authentication techniques such as NIR reflection spectroscopy. In one recent example, we used an NIR spectrometer and simple spectral data processing techniques to help a product authentication company detect inferior-grade materials in a well-known brand of $100-plus per pair sneakers.
Experimental Setup
We configured a system designed to easily and quickly scan some part of the shoe and provide a statistically significant indication of whether the sample is real or counterfeit. Here’s what we used:
A 400 µm reflection probe (QR400-7-VIS-NIR) was connected to a NIRQuest+2.5 spectrometer (900-2500 nm) and high-power tungsten halogen light source (HL-2000-HP). OceanView software was configured in reflection mode using a WS-1 white reflection standard to establish 100% reflection across the spectrum.
Various areas of each of six shoe samples (a combination of authentic and counterfeit sneakers) were observed with the reflection probe and the resulting spectra were saved for analysis. We measured the rubber soles, leather exterior, tongue exterior, interior fabric and even the laces, even though they are independent of the shoe assembly (unsurprisingly, the laces had nearly identical spectral features).