ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,437,599, issued on Oct. 7, was assigned to ALPVISION S.A. (Vevey, Switzerland).

"Means for using microstructure of materials surface as a unique identifier" was invented by Celine Di Venuto Dayer V (Les Paccots, Switzerland), Martin Kutter (Remaufens, Switzerland) and Frederic Jordan (Vevey, Switzerland).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The present application concerns the visual identification of materials or documents for tracking or authentication purposes. It describes methods to automatically authenticate an object by comparing some object images with reference images, the object images being characterized by the fact that visual elemen...