Architectural Bias in Face Presentation Attack Detection: A Comparative Study of Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks (opens in new tab)

Face Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) systems constitute a critical security layer in biometric authentication; however, existing approaches exhibit systematic performance disparities across demographic groups, disproportionately affecting individuals with darker skin tones. This paper presents a comparative empirical investigation of whether Vision Transformer architectures reduce demographic bias in face PAD systems relative to convolutiona...