Hindawi

Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience

Volume 2022, Article ID 8709145, 10 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/8709145

Research Article
Classification and Detection of Autism Spectrum Disorder
Based on Deep Learning Algorithms

Fawaz Waselallah Alsaade and Mohammed Saeed Alzahrani

College of Computer Science and Information Technology, King Faisal University, P.O. Box 4000, Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia

Correspondence should be addressed to Fawaz Waselallah Alsaade; falsaade@kfu.edu.sa

Received 1 January 2022; Revised 14 January 2022; Accepted 7 February 2022; Published 28 February 2022

Academic Editor: Deepika Koundal

Copyright © 2022 Fawaz Waselallah Alsaade and Mohammed Saeed Alzahrani. This is an open access article distributed under the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original work is properly cited.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a type of mental illness that can be detected by using social media data and biomedical images.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurological disease correlated with brain growth that later impacts the physical impression
of the face. Children with ASD have dissimilar facial landmarks, which set them noticeably apart from typically developed (TD)
children. Novelty of the proposed research is to design a system that is based on autism spectrum disorder detection on social
media and face recognition. To identify such landmarks, deep learning techniques may be used, but they require a precise
technology for extracting and producing the proper patterns of the face features. This study assists communities and psychiatrists
in experimentally detecting autism based on facial features, by using an uncomplicated web application based on a deep learning
system, that is, a convolutional neural network with transfer learning and the flask framework. Xception, Visual Geometry Group
Network (VGG19), and NASNETMobile are the pretrained models that were used for the classification task. The dataset that was
used to test these models was collected from the Kaggle platform and consisted of 2,940 face images. Standard evaluation metrics
such as accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity were used to evaluate the results of the three deep learning models. The Xception
model achieved the highest accuracy result of 91%, followed by VGG19 (80%) and NASNETMobile (78%).

1. Introduction skills. As these disorders also affect how a person perceives

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) refer to a group of
complex neurodevelopmental disorders of the brain such as
autism, childhood disintegrative disorders, and Asperger’s
syndrome, which, as the term “spectrum” implies, have a
wide range of symptoms and levels of severity [1]. These
disorders are currently included in the International Sta-
tistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Prob-
lems under Mental and Behavioral Disorders, in the category
of Pervasive Developmental Disorders [2]. The earliest
symptoms of ASD often appear within the first year of life
[3–6] and may include lack of eye contact, lack of response to
name calling, and indifference to caregivers. A small number
of children appear to develop normally in the first year, and
then show signs of autism between 18 and 24 months of age
[5], including limited and repetitive patterns of behavior, a
narrow range of interests and activities, and weak language
and socializes with others, children may suddenly become
introverted or aggressive in the first five years of life as they
experience difficulties in interacting and communicating
with society. While ASD appears in childhood, it tends to
persist into adolescence and adulthood [7].
Advanced information technology that uses artificial
intelligence (AI) models has helped to diagnose ASD early
through facial pattern recognition. Yolcu et al. [8] used the
convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithm to train data
for extracting components of human facial expressions and
proposed the use of such algorithm to detect facial ex-
pressions in many neurological disorders [9]. In 2018, Haque
and Valles [10], using deep learning approaches, updated the
Facial Expression Recognition 2013 dataset to recognize
facial expressions of autistic children. Rudovic et al. [11]
presented the CultureNet deep learning model that was used
to identify 30 videos.
2 Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience
Several studies have discovered important features of
autism in numerous ways to detect autism, such as feature
extraction [12], eye tracking [13], facial recognition, medical
image analysis [9], and voice recognition [14]. However,
facial recognition plays a more significant role in detecting
autism than the person’s emotional state. Facial recognition
is a common way to identify persons and to prove that they
are normal or abnormal. It involves mining pertinent in-
formation to disclose behavior patterns [15, 16]. Duda et al.
[17] introduced a new method of producing samples of
differentials between autism and attention deficit hyperac-
tivity disorder (ADHD) and using such differentials to
recognize autism. Sixty five samples of differentials on facial
expressions of social responsiveness were collected for the
datasets. Deshpande et al. [18] designed metrics for studying
brain activities to identify autism. AI and soft computing
approaches have also been applied to detect autism. Dif-
ferent studies have been conducted on detecting autism, but
few of them have focused on brain neuroimaging. Parikh
et al. [19] used machine learning approaches to develop a
system for extracting the characteristics of autism. They
gathered their dataset from 851 persons whom they classified
as having and not having ASD. Thabtah and Peebles [20]
used rule-based machine learning (RBML) to detect ASD
traits. Al Banna et al. [21] developed a smart system for
monitoring ASD patients during the coronavirus disease
2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
Many real-life applications of AI and machine algorithms
have been designed to help solve social problems. AI has been
used in all health applications to help doctors control diseases
such as autism. Artificial neural networks have been partic-
ularly focused on as a way to extract features of ASD patients
that can be used to discriminate between persons with and
without ASD. Among the techniques that have been used or
proposed to detect autism in children are deep learning
techniques, particularly, CNNs and recurrent neural networks
(RNNs) [22, 23], and the bidirectional long short-term
memory (BLSTM) model [24]. Lately, more studies have been
conducted to diagnose ASD using machine learning ap-
proaches such as [24, 25], brain imaging [26–28], analysis of
data on physical biomarkers [29–33], assessment of the be-
havior of persons with autism, and assessment of clinical data
using the machine learning approach [33].
Our study demonstrated the use of a well-trained clas-
sification model (based on transfer learning) to detect autism
from an image of a child. With the advent of high-speci-
fication mobile devices, this model can readily provide a
diagnostic test of putative autistic traits by taking an image
with cameras. The main contributions of our research are as
follows:
(i) Three pretrained deep learning algorithms were
applied for ASD detection: NASNETMobile,
Xception, and VGG19
(ii) The Xception model showed the best performance
of the three pretrained deep learning algorithms
(iii) A system was designed to help health officials to
detect ASD through eye and face identification
(iv) The developing system has been validated and ex-
amined using various methods.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
describes materials and methods of pretrained deep learning
models. Section 3 provides experiments. Section 4 and 5
provide results and discussion. The conclusion of papers is
presented in Section 6.
2. Materials and Methods
This study proposes a deep learning model based on transfer
learning, namely, Xception, NASNETMobile, and VGG1 9 to
detect autism using facial features of autistic and normal
children. Facial features can be used to determine if a child has
autism or is normal. The models extracted significant facial
features from the images. One of the advantages offered by deep
learning algorithms is the ability to extract very small details
from an image, which a person cannot notice with the naked
eye. Figure 1 shows the framework of our study, from the data
acquisition to the data preprocessing and loading, to the model
preparation and training, and to the model performance test.
2.1. Dataset. This study analyzed facial images of autistic
children and normal children obtained from Kaggle plat-
form, which is publicly accessible online [34]. The dataset
consisted of 2,940 face images, half of which were of autistic
children and the other half were of nonautistic children. This
dataset was collected through Internet sources such as
websites and Facebook pages that are interested in autism.
Table 1 shows the distribution of the split dataset samples.
The splitting of the input data is presented in Figure 2.
2.2. Preprocessing. The purpose of the data preprocessing
was to clean and crop the images. Because the data were
collected from Internet resources by Piosenka [34], they had
to be preprocessed before they could be used to train the
deep learning model. The dataset creator automatically
cropped the face from the original image. Then, the dataset
was split into 2,540 images for training, 100 for validation,
and 300 for testing. To scaling, the normalization method
was applied; the dataset was rescaling the parameters of all
the images from the pixel values [0, 255] to [0, 1].
2.3. Convolutional Neural Network Models. AI has been
remarkably developed to assist humans in their daily life, for
example, through medical applications, which are based on a
branch of AI called “computer vision.” Hence, the CNN
algorithm has contributed to the detection of diseases and to
behavioral and psychological analysis.
2.3.1. Basic Components of the CNN Model. The convolu-
tional neural network (CNN) is one of the most famous deep
learning algorithms. It takes the input image and assigns
importance to learnable weights and biases in order to
recognize the class of the image. The neuron can be said to be
a simulation of the communication pattern of the neurons of
Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience 3

Load training and Model Fine

Data acquisition Prepare Model
Test Dataset Tuning

Confusion Matrix
Prepare the
and Calculate Prediction Model Fitting
Testing dataset
Results

Figure 1: The framework of our study.

Table 1: Splitting of the dataset for training, testing, and validation.

Total face images Training set (%) Validation set (%) Testing set (%)
2,940 2,540 100 300

3500
3000 2940
2540
2500
Numbers of images

2000

1500

1000

500 300
100
0

-500
Testing set (%) Validation set (%) Training Total face Total face images
images
Datasets
Figure 2: Splitting of the dataset.

the human brain through the interconnection and com- max pooling
munication between cells. In this section, we will explain the
20 30
basic components of the CNN model: the input layer,
112 37
convolutional layer, activating function, pooling layer, fully 12 20 30 0
connected layer, and output prediction.
8 12 2 0
34 70 37 4 average pooling
2.3.2. Convolutional Layer with a Pooling Layer. The input 112 100 25 12
of the convolutional layer is an image as a matrix of pixel 13 8
values. The objective of the convolutional layer is to reduce the 79 20
images into a form that can be easily processed without losing
Figure 3: The convolution layer and max pooling and average
their important features that will help to detect autism. The
pooling.
first layer of the CNN model is responsible for extracting low-
level features such as edges and color. The build of the CNN
model allowed us to add more layers to it to enable it to extract processes. The slide window of the kernel extracts the features
the high-level features that will help it understand images. Due from the input image and converts the image into a matrix,
to the large number of parameters outputted from the con- after which the number of the parameters is mathematically
volution layer, which may significantly prolong the arithmetic reduced through max pooling and average pooling.
operations of the matrices, the number of weights was reduced
by using one of the following two techniques: max pooling or
average pooling. Max pooling is based on the maximum values 2.3.3. Fully Connected Layer and Activation Function.
in each window in the stride, while average pooling is based on The fully connected (FC) layer is a nonlinear combination of
the mean value of each window in the stride. In this study, the the high-level features that received the input from the
model was based on max pooling. Figure 3 shows the con- hidden layers and are represented as outputs. In the FC layer,
volutional layer and the max pooling and average pooling the input image is represented as a column vector. The
4 Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience

training of the model has two paths: the forward neural

network and backpropagation. The forward neural network
feeds form flattened output layer. In the backpropagation,
the neural network minimizes the loss errors and learns
more features by applying the number of the training it-
erations. Most deep learning models show high performance
while increasing the number of the hidden layers and the
training iterations, which allows the neural network to
extract the low-level features deeply. The softmax classifier
receives the parameters from the FC layer and calculates the
properties to predict the output, as shown in Figure 4. A
Softmax output of 0 means the image belongs to class 0 and a
Softmax output of 1 means the image belongs to class 1 In
this study, class 0 is the autism class and class 1 is the normal
class.
2.4. Deep Learning Models. This paper is based on three
pretrained models for autism detection using facial feature
images: NASNetMobile, VGG19, and Xception.
2.4.1. Xception Model. The Xception model was trained on
the ImageNet dataset [2, 3] for the image recognition and
classification task. Xception is a deep CNN that provides
new inception layers. The inception layers are built from
depthwise convolution layers and are followed by a point-
wise convolution layer. Transfer learning has two concepts:
feature extraction and fine-tuning. In this study, the feature
extraction method used the pretraining model, which was
trained on the standard dataset to extract the feature from
the new dataset and to remove the top layers of the model.
The new top layers were added to the model for custom
classification based on the number of classes. Fine-tuning
has been used to adapt the generic features to a given class to
avoid overwriting. Figure 5 shows the network used in the
Xception model architecture for extracting the image fea-
tures for the dataset. The Xception architecture used the
features maps, followed by a global max pooling layer and
two dense layers, 128 and 64, respectively, with a rule ac-
tivation function. Then, the output of the dense layers was
passed to the flatten layer, which took the input as a feature
map and the output as a vector. Batch normalization was
used to enhance the output by avoiding overfitting. Keras
supported the early-stopping method, which stopped the
training when the validation loss of the model did not
improve. In this model, the RMSprop optimizer was used to
reduce the error learning rate or loss during the training of
the parameters of the CNN model. The last layer for the
output prediction used the Softmax function.
Fully-Connected Layer Activation function
Figure 4: The fully connected layer and the activation function.
input volume size, max pooling layers were employed as
assigners in VGG19. In the VGG19 structure, two FC layers
were adopted with 4,096 neurons to associate each layer with
others in the model. The structure of VGG19 is presented in
Figure 6.
(i) Input layer: the function of this layer is to take and
accept an image input with a size of 224 × 224 × 3.
For the ImageNet race, the inventors of the model
picked out the center 224 × 224 × 3 patch in each
image to retain the input size of the image
dependable.
(ii) Convolutional layers: VGG’s convolutional layers
leverage a minimal receptive field, i.e., 3 × 3, the
minimum probable size that still releases up/down
and left/right. The convolution stride is fixed at 1
pixel to conserve the spatial resolution after the
convolution (the stride is the number of pixel shifts
over the input matrix).
(iii) Hidden layers: all the hidden layers in the VGG
network use ReLU. VGG does not frequently in-
fluence Local Response Normalization (LRN), as it
increases the memory utilization and the training
time. Furthermore, it does not enhance the overall
accuracy of the model.
(iv) Fully connected layers: of the three FC layers, the
first two had 4,096 channels each, and the third had
1,000 channels.
3. Experiments
The results of the deep learning models are presented in this
section, and the significant results of developing system are
declared.

3.1. Experimental Setup. The experiment was executed on

2.4.2. Visual Geometry Group Network (VGG) Model.
different libraries of python and hardware devices for devel-
VGG19 stands for the visual geometry group network
oping an intelligent autism detection system (ADS). Table 2
(VGG19), a deep artificial neural network model with a 19
shows the main requirements for the design of the ADS.
artificial multilayers process. Primarily, VGG19 is based on
the CNN technique, is commonly implemented on the
ImageNet dataset, and is valuable because of its straight- 3.2. Evaluation Metrics. This study uses different types of
forwardness, as 3 × 3 convolutional layers are attached to its performance evaluation metrics for the three pretrained
upper side to upsurge with the gravity level. To reduce the models such as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity and a
Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience 5

Xception Model Dense layer

Input Face Image Average-
Pooling Layer
Softmax
Function

Autism

Normal

Figure 5: Xception model architecture in our study.

224×224×64
224×224×3 112×112×128
Input Face Image 56×56×256
28×28×512
14×14×512
7×7×512
1×1×4096 1×1×1000

Figure 6: VGG19 model.

Table 2: Experimental setup. TP + TN

Accuracy � × 100%,
Hardware Software/libraries FP + FN + TP + TN
Processor core I7 TensorFlow library TN
Keras library Specificity � × 100%, (1)
Panda seaborn TN + FN
8 GB RAM
Matplotlib TP
Numpy Sensitivity � × 100%,
TP + FP
Note. The model parameters were set with 100 epochs and with a batch size
of 32. To avoid overfitting and to optimize the training time, the early stop where TP is the True Positive, FP is the False Positive, TN is
strategy was used, whereby the training was stopped after 28 epochs. The the True Negative, and FN is the False Negative. Specificity is
parameters of the deep learning model are shown in Table 3.
the capacity of the model to correctly identify the normal
children, and sensitivity is the capacity of the model to
Table 3: Parameters used in the pretrained deep learning models.
correctly identify autistic children.

Parameter name Value

Global max pooling layer size
Dense layer
Batch size
Number of epochs
Output classification layer
Optimizer
Activation function
confusion matrix. A confusion matrix is a type of measure of
classification performance that represents a table of the true
and false values of the testing results. In the confusion matrix
of the Xception model, the True Positives were 132 autistic
children out of 150 autistic children, the False Negatives
were 18 children classified as autistic children, the True
Negatives were 141 correctly classified children out of the
150 normal children, and the False Positives were 9 children.
The equations for these metrics are as follows:
4. Results
3∗3
128, 64 This section presents the testing results of the experiments
32 conducted to detect ASD. Table 4 summarizes the testing
100 results of the used deep learning models.
Softmax
In these experiments, three different pretrained deep
ADAM
Rule
learning models, namely, Xception, VGG19, and NAS-
NetMobile were implemented to detect ASD. Each model
was trained and tested to extract the traits that categorize
children as autistic and as normal based on their facial
features. Figure 7 shows the confusion metrics of the
three deep learning models. They show that the Xception
model had the highest testing accuracy, 91%, of the three
models, and the NASNetMobile model had the lowest
performance level of 78%. Although the dataset was
collected from Internet sources by the data generator,
which clearly showed the difference in ages and the
quality of the photography, the Xception model showed
6 Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience

Table 4: Testing results of the pretrained deep learning models.

Model name Specificity Sensitivity Accuracy
Xception 0.94 0.88 0.91
VGG19 0.83 0.78 0.80
NASNETMobile 0.75 0.82 0.78

Confusion Matrix Confusion Matrix

120
120

Autism 127 23 Autism 121 29 100

100
True label

True label
80 80

60 60
Normal 36 114 Normal 35 115
40
40

Autism Normal Autism Normal

Predicted label Predicted label
(a) (b)
Confusion Matrix

120

Autism 129 21 100

True label

80

60
Normal 40 110
40

Autism Normal
Predicted label
(c)

Figure 7: Confusion matrices for the. (a) VGG19 model, (b) NASNetmobile model, and (c) Xception model.

the highest accuracy, with only a small percentage of
errors.
The performance of the VGG19 model for the training
and validation of the data for ASD detection is presented in
Figure 8(a), with the y-axis representing the score percentage
and the x-axis indicating the number of epochs. In the
training process, the accuracy of the VGG19 model rose
from 56% to 85% after 25 epochs, and in the validation
process, its accuracy was 82%. Its training and validation
losses are presented in Figure 8(b). Its training loss was 3.5,
and its validation loss was 2.5.
Figure 9 shows the performance of the NASNetMobile
model in detecting ASD. The graphic plot shows that the
model did not have good results. Its training and validation
accuracy percentages are shown in Figure 9(a), with the y-
axis representing the score percentage and the x-axis indi-
cating the number of epochs. Its accuracy in the training
stage was 70–90% and in the validation stagewas 65–78%. It
had good results in the training phase but poorer results in
the validation phase than another deep learning model. Its
entropy training and validation losses are presented in
Figure 9(b). Its training loss was 4.0, and its validation loss
was 3.2. Its performance plot shows overfitting in the
training process, which explains why its accuracy percentage
was lower.
The Xception model achieved 91% accuracy for the
testing data and 100% accuracy for the training data.
Figure 10(a) shows its accuracy performance. Its accuracy in
the training process was 100% and in the validation process
was from 70% to 91%. It was observed that the Xception
Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience 7

Accuracy over 100 Epochs Loss over 100 Epochs

0.85 3.5

0.80 3.0

0.75 2.5

0.70 2.0

0.65 1.5

0.60 1.0

0.5
0.55
0 5 10 15 20 25 0 5 10 15 20 25
Train_accuracy Train_loss
valid_accuracy valid_loss
(a) (b)

Figure 8: Overall performance plot for the VGG19 model. (a) Model performance. (b) Model loss.

Accuracy over 100 Epochs Loss over 100 Epochs

0.90 4.0

0.85 3.5
3.0
0.80
2.5
0.75
2.0
0.70
1.5
0.65
1.0
0.60
0.5
0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 20
Train_accuracy Train_loss
valid_accuracy valid_loss
(a) (b)

Figure 9: Overall performance plot for the NASNetMobile model. (a) Model performance. (b) Model loss.

model is the appropriate deep learning model for detecting
ASD. Its validation loss is shown in Figure 10(b) as 2.0.
5. Results and Discussion
People with autism face difficulties and challenges in un-
derstanding the world around them and in understanding
their thoughts, feelings, and needs. The world surrounding a
person with autism seems to him like a horror movie, and he
finds some sounds and lights and even smells and tastes of
foods frightening and sometimes painful. Thus, when a
sudden change occurs in their world, they are terrified that
no one else can understand.
Diagnosing autism is very important to save the lives of
many children. Developing an intelligence system based on
AI can help identify autism early. In this study, three ad-
vanced deep learning models, namely, Xception, VGG19,
and NASNetMobile were considered for use in diagnosing
autism. The empirical results of these models were pre-
sented, and it was noted that the Xception model attained
the highest accuracy of 91%.
The results of the comparative prediction analysis of the
Xception model and the existing system are presented in
Table 5. Musser [35] used the VGGFace model that attained
85% accuracy. Tamilarasi et al. [36, 37] used deep learning
ResNet50 to detect autism but with small data, that is, only
49 images. Its accuracy was 89%. Jahanara et al. [38] in-
troduced the VGG19 model to identify autism through facial
images. The VGG19 model achieved 84% accuracy in the
validation accuracy process.
In this study, three deep learning algorithms were used
to detect autism. We observed that the Xception model
showed significant accuracy, 91%, compared with existing
systems. Figure 11 shows the results of the comparison of
8 Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience

1.00 4.0
3.5
0.95
3.0
0.90
2.5
0.85 2.0

0.80 1.5
1.0
0.75
0.5
0.70 0.0
0 5 10 15 20 25 0 5 10 15 20 25
Train_accuracy Train_loss
valid_accuracy valid_loss
(a) (b)

Figure 10: Plot of the training and validation accuracy of the Xception model. (a) Accuracy performance. (b) Model loss.

Table 5: Comparison of the results of our system and existing models.

Author Datasets Model Accuracy (%)
Han et al. [35] Same as our dataset VGGFace 85.0
Haque et al. [10] The dataset included 19 TD and 20ASD children ResNet50 89.2
Beary et al. [38] Same as our dataset VGG19 84.0
Developing model MobileNet 91.0

Accuracy
100
98
96
94
92 91
90 89
88
%

86 85
84
84
82
80
78
76
Musser et al,2020 Tamilarasi et al.,2020 Jahanara et al.,2020 proposed system
Results
Figure 11: Comparison results of the developing system with existing systems.

our developing system with various existing systems.
Overall, our developing system outperformed all the existing
systems.
6. Conclusions
Interest in child autism has risen due to the advances in
global health know-how and capacities. Moreover, the
number of autistic children has increased in recent years,
due to which researchers and academics have intensified
their efforts to uncover the causes of autism and to detect it
early in order to give autistic people behavioral development
treatment programs that should help them integrate into
society and leave the isolation of the autistic world.
This paper evaluated the performance of three deep
learning models in detecting ASD through facial features:
NASNETMobile, Xception, and VGG19. Each model was
trained on a publicly available dataset on the Internet, and
Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience
the best result for classification accuracy was achieved by the
Xception model (91%). The results of the model classifica-
tion showed us the possibility of using such models based on
deep learning and computer vision as automatic tools for
specialists and families to accurately and more quickly di-
agnose autism. Computer techniques contribute to the
successful conduct of complex behavioral and psychological
analyses for autism diagnosis that require a longer time and
great effort.
Data Availability
The dataset used to support the findings of the study are
available at https://www.kaggle.com/cihan063/autism-
image-data (accessed on 10 December 2021).
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgments
The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of
Scientific Research at King Faisal University for funding this
research work through project no. NA00075.
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