Abstract
People with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) have difficulty recognizing and engaging with others. The symptoms of ASD may occur in a wide range of situations. There are numerous different types of functions for people with an ASD. Although it may be possible to reduce the symptoms of ASD and enhance the quality of life with appropriate treatment and support, there is no cure. Developing expert systems for identifying ASD based on the facial landmarks of children is the main contribution for improvements in the healthcare system in Saudi Arabia for detecting ASD at an early stage. However, deep learning algorithms have provided outstanding performances in a variety of pattern-recognition studies. The use of techniques based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has been proposed by several scholars to use in investigations of ASD. At present, there is no diagnostic test available for ASD, making this diagnosis challenging. Clinicians focus on a patient's behavior and developmental history. Therefore, using the facial landmarks of children has become very important for detecting ASDs as the face is thought to be a reflection of the brain; it has the potential to be used as a diagnostic biomarker, in addition to being an easy-to-use and practical tool for the early detection of ASDs. This study uses a variety of transfer learning approaches observed in deep CNNs to recognize autistic children based on facial landmark detection. An empirical study is conducted to discover the ideal settings for the optimizer and hyperparameters in the CNN model so that its prediction accuracy can be improved. A transfer learning approach, such as MobileNetV2 and hybrid VGG19, is used with different machine learning programs, such as logistic regression, a linear support vector machine (linear SVC), random forest, decision tree, gradient boosting, MLPClassifier, and K-nearest neighbors. The deep learning models are examined using a standard research dataset from Kaggle, which contains 2940 images of autistic and non-autistic children. The MobileNetV2 model achieved an accuracy of 92% on the test set. The results of the proposed research indicate that MobileNetV2 transfer learning strategies are better than those developed in existing systems. The updated version of our model has the potential to assist physicians in verifying the accuracy of their first screening for ASDs in child patients.