LaED: a novel lightweight, edge-aware and explainable deep learning model for privacy-preserving facial attendance tracking in resource-constrained educational environments.

Facial recognition is increasingly adopted for automated classroom attendance; however, real-world deployment in schools remains constrained by privacy risks, ethical obligations, demographic bias, spoofing threats, and limited computational resources. Recent incidents involving Microsoft Teams in New South Wales in 2025 and Chelmer Valley High School in the United Kingdom show how poorly governed systems violate student rights and regulatory compliance. Despite growing adoption, many existing attendance systems focus narrowly on recognition accuracy or efficiency, while overlooking spoof resistance, open-set identity handling, fairness mitigation, auditability, and privacy protection. This paper presents LaED, a lightweight, edge-aware, and explainable deep learning framework for privacy-preserving classroom attendance in resource-constrained educational environments. The framework combines multimodal spoof detection, open-set facial recognition, and fairness-aware representation learning within a unified edge-based design. Spoofing attacks, including replay and deepfake attempts, are mitigated through the fusion of physiological and temporal facial cues, while unknown identities are explicitly rejected to reduce proxy attendance. To support responsible deployment, LaED incorporates federated learning with differential privacy, ensuring that biometric data remain local to schools while enabling accountable model updates. Experimental evaluation on CASIA-FASD, CelebA-Spoof, DFDC, FairFace, and a consent-driven classroom dataset shows that LaED achieves over 97.8% recognition accuracy, APCER and BPCER values below 2%, demographic fairness gaps under 2%, and inference latency below 150 milliseconds on edge hardware. Additional tests confirm reliable operation under realistic classroom conditions. These results demonstrate that regulation-aligned and trustworthy facial attendance is feasible on low-cost devices, offering a practical pathway for responsible biometric AI in education.