Face presentation attack detection via content-adaptive spatial operators

Face presentation attack detection (FacePAD) is critical for securing facial authentication against print, replay, and mask-based spoofing. This paper proposes CASO-PAD, an RGB-only, single-frame model that enhances MobileNetV3 with content-adaptive spatial operators (involution) to better capture localized spoof cues. Unlike spatially shared convolution kernels, the proposed operator generates location-specific, channel-shared kernels conditioned on the input, improving spatial selectivity with minimal overhead. CASO-PAD remains lightweight (3.6M parameters; 0.64 GFLOPs at $256\\times256$) and is trained end-to-end using a standard binary cross-entropy objective. Extensive experiments on Replay-Attack, Replay-Mobile, ROSE-Youtu, and OULU-NPU demonstrate strong performance, achieving 100/100/98.9/99.7\\% test accuracy, AUC of 1.00/1.00/0.9995/0.9999, and HTER of 0.00/0.00/0.82/0.44\\%, respectively. On the large-scale SiW-Mv2 Protocol-1 benchmark, CASO-PAD further attains 95.45\\% accuracy with 3.11\\% HTER and 3.13\\% EER, indicating improved robustness under diverse real-world attacks. Ablation studies show that placing the adaptive operator near the network head and using moderate group sharing yields the best accuracy--efficiency balance. Overall, CASO-PAD provides a practical pathway for robust, on-device FacePAD with mobile-class compute and without auxiliary sensors or temporal stacks.