Facial Features Detection System to Identify Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Deep Learning Models

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with brain development that subsequently affects the physical appearance of the face. Autistic children have different patterns of facial features, which set them distinctively apart from typically developed (TD) children. This study is aimed at helping families and psychiatrists diagnose autism using an easy technique, viz., a deep learning-based web application for detecting autism based on experimentally tested facial features using a convolutional neural network with transfer learning and a flask framework. MobileNet, Xception, and InceptionV3 were the pretrained models used for classification. The facial images were taken from a publicly available dataset on Kaggle, which consists of 3,014 facial images of a heterogeneous group of children, i.e., 1,507 autistic children and 1,507 nonautistic children. Given the accuracy of the classification results for the validation data, MobileNet reached 95% accuracy, Xception achieved 94%, and InceptionV3 attained 0.89%.