ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 15 -- United States Patent no. 12,602,950, issued on April 14, was assigned to ImageShield LLC (Fairfax, Va.).

"System and methods for identifying a verified searcher" was invented by Michael Gallagher (Fairfax Station, Va.) and Vinay Kumar Thadem (Fairfax, Va.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The invention relates generally to protecting content via facial recognition technology and more particularly to a system and methods for identifying a verified user in searchable media based on facial recognition. The system may be configured to receive content and verify that the content corresponds to the user. The system may then process verified content to extract features corr...