Towards Automatic Screening of Typical and Atypical Behaviors in Children With Autism

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) impact the cognitive, social, communicative and behavioral abilities of an individual. The development of new clinical decision support systems is of importance in reducing the delay between presentation of symptoms and an accurate diagnosis. In this work, we contribute a new database consisting of video clips of typical (normal) and atypical (such as hand flapping, spinning or rocking) behaviors, displayed in natural settings, which have been collected from the YouTube video website. We propose a preliminary non-intrusive approach based on skeleton keypoint identification using pretrained deep neural networks on human body video clips to extract features and perform body movement analysis that differentiates typical and atypical behaviors of children. Experimental results on the newly contributed database show that our platform performs best with decision tree as the classifier when compared to other popular methodologies and offers a baseline against which alternate approaches may developed and tested.