Manufacturing giant develops revolutionary system to detect counterfeit art

A detail from Franz von Stuck’s Es war einmal, 1891, based on The Story of The Frog Prince. It was taken last year from Deutsches Museum, replaced with a fake and auctioned for £60,000.
Photograph: Alamy

Revolutionary technology invented to identify counterfeit spare parts in the car and aerospace industries has now been adapted to detect counterfeit works of art.

The developers of the “optical recognition system” claim they have created “tamper-proof digital fingerprints” of paintings and sculptures that could, for example, enable museums to spot – within seconds – whether an original work has been swapped with a fake.