Age Estimation Overview

How iDenfy’s selfie-based age estimation works: the session flow, document step-up outcomes, and the statuses and outcomes a session can resolve to.

Looking for Age Verification instead? That’s a different, simpler feature — a min/max age restriction applied during a full KYC verification, based on the scanned document’s date of birth. See Age Verification.

Age Estimation checks whether an end user meets a minimum age requirement using a single selfie — no document scan required in the common case. It’s suited for age-gating use cases (e.g. alcohol, gambling, adult content) where you need a fast yes/no decision without putting every user through a full identity verification.

When the AI model isn’t confident enough to decide on its own, the session can automatically step up to a document check, which reads an exact date of birth from the ID.

Sessions can be created and reviewed from the dashboard, or created programmatically — see API integration. Charges draw on finances allocated to Age Estimation; see Age Estimation Billing.

Results reach your systems through the result webhook. To list past estimations, filter them, or inspect an individual session, sign in to the dashboard — there is no Partner API endpoint for retrieving sessions.

How a Session Flows

1. Create

   You create a session with the desired settings. You get back a verification link and an expiry time.

2. Capture

   You send the end user to the verification link; they complete the selfie on the hosted capture page.

3. Estimate

   The AI produces an age estimate:

   • Confident and above the minimum age → Success.
   • Confident and below the minimum age → Underage.
   • Not confident (within the safety margin) → step-up, if enabled:
     • document step-up enabled → a document check is created and the age is read from the ID’s date of birth (see Step-Up Outcomes).
     • document step-up disabled → the session resolves as Uncertain.
4. Result

   When the session finishes, iDenfy sends a result notification to your webhook (if set), redirects the user to the matching redirect URL (if configured), and shows the outcome in the dashboard.

Step-Up Outcomes

A document step-up ends in one of the following ways. Note that the document’s date of birth is an exact age, so it is compared directly against the minimum age — the safety margin applies only to the fuzzy AI estimate and is not used here.

Document check result	What happens
Document accepted	The date of birth is read and the ID portrait is compared against the capture selfie. On a match the session resolves as Success (age ≥ minimum) or Underage.
Document accepted but flagged for possible fraud	Treated the same as accepted: the document was read successfully, so its age is used and the session resolves as Success or Underage. The fraud flag is retained by iDenfy for review and is not currently reported in the result notification.
Document rejected	The age could not be established from the ID, so the session resolves as Uncertain. This is terminal — the end user is not re-prompted for another ID.
Face did not match	The ID does not appear to belong to the person who took the selfie; the session resolves as Face Mismatch. This is terminal.
Step-up abandoned or lapsed	The end user backed out, or the document session expired before completion. The session stays live and the end user can start a step-up again, subject to the retry limit.

Fraud-flagged documents are accepted. iDenfy may flag a document session for possible fraudulent activity even when the document itself was read and the face matched. Because the purpose of the step-up is to establish the age, such a session yields a normal Success / Underage result rather than Uncertain. If your own risk policy needs to act on the fraud signal, contact iDenfy — surfacing it in the result notification is planned but not yet available.

Statuses and Outcomes

A session has a lifecycle status, and once it finishes, an outcome. The values below are what the API returns; the dashboard shows the same values as labels.

Status

Value	Meaning
PENDING	Created, awaiting/undergoing capture.
PROCESSING	Reserved lifecycle state.
COMPLETED	Finished with a definitive result.
FAILED	Finished unsuccessfully (technical failure or unrecoverable outcome).
EXPIRED	Session lapsed without a terminal result.

Outcome

Value	Dashboard label	Meaning
SUCCESS	Success	Meets the minimum age.
UNDERAGE	Underage	Below the minimum age.
UNCERTAIN	Uncertain	Inconclusive: an uncertain estimate with the step-up disabled, a document step-up whose document was rejected, or a technical failure during the step-up.
FACE_MISMATCH	Face Mismatch	Step-up document face did not match the selfie.
ATTEMPTS_EXCEEDED	Attempts Exceeded	Retry limit reached without a decision.

API Integration

Create a Session

Create a session from your backend, with the full request schema and error responses.

Result Webhook

Receive the outcome as soon as a session finishes.