Vision-Based Pointing Estimation and Evaluation in Toddlers for Autism Screening

Early screening of autism spectrum disorder is essential since early intervention can enhance the functional social behavior of autistic children. Among the behavior characteristics of autism, pointing is strongly related to human communicative interaction and cognitive development. To improve the efficiency and accuracy of autism screening, this paper presents a novel vision-based evaluation method for pointing behavior in the screening scenario: expressing needs with pointing (ENP). During the protocol process, a series of features such as hand position, gesture, the pointing direction can be detected, and the pointing behavior can be assessed by the evaluation method. In order to verify the effectiveness of the protocol and evaluation method, 19 toddlers (8 ASD toddlers and 11 non-ASD toddlers) between the ages of 16 and 32 months participate in this study. The accuracy of the automatic evaluation method for pointing behavior is 17/19. It shows that the ENP protocol and the proposed method based on computer vision are feasible in the early screening of autism.