IDENTIFYING CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER BASED ON GAZE-FOLLOWING

This paper presents a novel method to identify children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) based on the stimuli with gaze-following. Individuals with ASD are characterized by having atypical visual attention patterns, especially in social scenes. Gaze-following is considered to be a key element in understanding social scenarios, and it is reasonable to use stimuli with gaze-following to identify the children with ASD. Thus in this paper, we first construct a dataset of eye movements in gaze-following scenes for children with ASD (i.e., GazeFollow4ASD dataset), including 300 images with gaze-following information inside them and the corresponding eye movement data collected from 8 children with ASD and 10 healthy controls. We propose a novel deep neural network (DNN) model to extract discriminative features and classify children with ASD and healthy controls on single images. The proposed model shows the best performance among all compared methods on all datasets.