Smart data capture company Scandit has introduced Age Verified Self-Checkout, a system that uses smartphone-based facial age estimation or ID scanning to clear purchases of age-restricted products without a store associate stepping in.
Facial age estimation infers a shopper’s likely age from an image of their face, without identifying them or matching them to a stored record, a lighter-touch approach than checking a name against an identity document. Built for retailers selling alcohol, tobacco, and medication, the system is designed to remove one of the more persistent bottlenecks in self-checkout, the manual age check. When a shopper scans a restricted item, the kiosk shows a QR code; the shopper scans it with their phone, which opens a verification page in the browser, and takes a selfie that on-device vision AI uses to estimate their age. If the estimate clears the retailer’s threshold, checkout continues; if it falls below, the shopper is prompted to scan an ID, which is read on-device and compared against the selfie to catch someone using another person’s document. The kiosk receives only a pass or fail signal, and no app download is required.
Scandit says the product is its first move into biometrics and was designed to keep data on the phone, with processing performed on-device and no biometric or ID data transmitted or stored by Scandit or the retailer. The company says it complies with GDPR, CCPA, ISO 27001, and ISO/IEC 27566-1, an emerging international standard for age assurance, and holds UKAS Challenge 25 certification, referring to the UK retail policy under which anyone who looks under 25 is asked to prove they are of age. By Scandit’s own calculations, roughly nine billion age-restricted self-checkout transactions take place globally each year, and the company says its system resolves about 80 percent of age checks automatically.
Facial age estimation has been moving into retail through a series of trials, from Yoti’s age technology in a UK self-checkout trial to the Channel Islands Co-op’s pilot at stores in Jersey, as regulators and standards bodies work out how to treat estimation as a compliance tool.
“Retailers are under pressure to deliver faster, more convenient self-checkout experiences, yet age-restricted sales remain a persistent bottleneck and one that only intensifies as self-checkout fleets scale,” said Christian Floerkemeier, CTO and co-founder of Scandit. The company is targeting grocery, supermarket, fuel, and convenience environments with high self-checkout volumes.
Sources: Scandit
–
By Ji-seo Kim
