An auxiliary screening system for autism spectrum disorder based on emotion and attention analysis

The screening and diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD) suffer from great challenges due to insufficient professional clinicians and complex procedures. It is urgent to introduce an effective auxiliary system in the diagnosis and treatment process to assist in the completion of pathological information collection tasks, consequently simplifying the screening method and improving the accuracy of screening. We propose a computer vision-based early screening system for ASD to characterize the facial expressions and eye gaze attention which are considered to remarkable indicators for early screening of autism. The system provides the subjects with three different virtual interaction modes: video, picture, and virtual interactive game. During the interaction between the subject and the computer, the system extracts and analyzes the quantitative information of the subject's performance. Then, through computer vision-based emotion analysis and attention analysis methods, the subject's emotions and attention features in the three interaction modes are automatically calculated to assist in the early screening of autism. Finally, the accuracy and feasibility of the system are verified through experiments on both the publicly available dataset and the data collected from 10 ASD children.