A Facial Affect Analysis System for Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end machine learning-based system for classifying autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using facial attributes such as expressions, action units, arousal, and valence. Our system classifies ASD using representations of different facial attributes from convolutional neural networks, which are trained on images in the wild. Our experimental results show that different facial attributes used in our system are statistically significant and improve sensitivity, specificity, and F1 score of ASD classification by a large margin. In particular, the addition of different facial attributes improves the performance of ASD classification by about 7% which achieves a F1 score of 76%.