Selfie verification

Taking a selfie to prove you are the person on an ID or the owner of an account.

The person takes a photo or short video of their face with a phone, and the system checks that the face is real, live, and the same as the one on file.

A biometric check that combines face capture, liveness detection, and face matching to confirm that a live person is present and that their face matches a reference image. A reference image is the photo the selfie is compared against, such as the portrait on an ID document, the photo stored on a document's chip, or a face template saved at enrollment.

A selfie verification typically runs in these steps:

1. The app guides the person to take a selfie, with feedback on lighting and framing.
2. The system runs liveness detection to confirm a real person is in front of the camera.
3. It compares the face with the reference image and produces a similarity score.
4. It checks that the video came from a real camera, and not an injected feed.
5. It returns a pass or fail result, or sends the case for review.

Selfie verification can serve different purposes:

• Onboarding, where the selfie is matched to the photo on a newly submitted ID.
• Re-verification, where the selfie is matched to the face captured at signup before a high-risk action.
• Account recovery, where it helps a person regain access when they have lost their login method.

Selfie verification sits next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Face match (1:1) is the comparison step inside selfie verification.
• Liveness detection is the check that the selfie comes from a live person.
• Identity verification (IDV) is the wider process, in which the selfie is one part.