Concentric AI has introduced a vision model feature for its Concentric AI Semantic Intelligence platform designed to detect sensitive documents based on their visual characteristics.

The company said the feature provides a way to identify documents with unique visual signatures, including passports and driver licenses, helping organizations discover sensitive information stored across environments and in different formats.

The feature can analyze and understand the content of an image based on visually consistent characteristics. According to Concentric AI, it can identify the type of document even when its contents are blurred. Examples include the biographic page of a passport from any country and driver licenses from any U.S. state.

“Many sensitive documents carry a distinct visual identity,” said Dr. Madhu Shashanka, Co-Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Concentric AI. “Not taking advantage of these visual cues leaves valuable signals untapped and limits the capability to discover and protect sensitive data.”

Shashanka said Concentric AI is advancing approaches to data security by using signals that traditional discovery methods may overlook. The company said the technology is intended to go beyond textual data discovery to identify sensitive information regardless of format.

Concentric AI said the new feature offers a more cost-effective and reliable alternative to some limitations of optical character recognition (OCR). OCR requires processing every pixel in an image to detect characters and convert them into machine-readable text, which can require considerable computing resources.

The company also said OCR can have difficulty accurately detecting information in low-quality images. At the same time, threat actors could potentially use AI to extract enough information from those images for malicious purposes.

Concentric AI said visually distinctive documents are not limited to standardized identification documents. Documents specific to an organization can also have characteristic visual signatures.

The feature will allow Concentric AI partners to help customers build dedicated models for discovering sensitive data based on visually consistent characteristics within their environments. Concentric AI’s new capabilities are now available.