Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that influences the communication and social behavior of a person in a way that those in the spectrum have difficulty in perceiving other peoples facial expressions, as well as presenting and communicating emotions and affect via their own faces and bodies. Some efforts have been made to predict and improve children with ASDs affect states in play therapy, a common method to improve childrens social skills via play and games. However, many previous works only used pre-trained models on benchmark emotion datasets and failed to consider the distinction in emotion between typically developing children and children with autism. In this paper, we present an open-source two-stage multi-modal approach leveraging acoustic and visual cues to predict three main affect states of children with ASDs affect states (positive, negative, and neutral) in real-world play therapy scenarios, and achieved an overall accuracy of 72:40%. This work presents a novel way to combine human expertise and machine intelligence for ASD affect recognition by proposing a two-stage schema.
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