Autism Spectrum Disorder Classification via Local and Global Feature Representation of Facial Image

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects social communication and interaction. Early diagnosis of ASD can mitigate the severity and help with ideal treatment direction. Computer vision-based methods with traditional machine learning and deep learning are employed in the literature for automatic diagnosis. Recently, deep learning with a facial image-based ASD classification has gained interest due to its ease of collection and non-invasiveness. We observed that the existing approaches utilized either local or global features of facial images to diagnose ASD. However, its important to consider both local and global features to obtain fine-grained details and larger contextual information for accurate detection and classification. This paper proposes a sequencer-based patch-wise Local Feature Extractor along with a Global Feature Extractor. Finally, the features from these modules are aggregated to obtain the final feature for the classification of ASD. Experiments on a publicly available Autism Facial Image Dataset demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance. We achieved accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of 94.7%, 94.0%, 95.3%, and 94.6%, respectively.