ASD-FEAT: A Multi-Modal Infant Video-Derived Dataset for Early ASD Risk Prediction

Sidrah Liaqat, Halil Helvaci, Sen-Ching Cheung, Chongruo Wu, Dongjie Chen +2

Accurate early screening for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a precursor to timely intervention, which is critical for improving cognitive and behavioral outcomes. We present ASD-FEAT (ASD - Feature Extraction And Tracking), a multimodal dataset derived from video recordings of infant-adult interaction sessions. The key contribution of ASD-FEAT is the combination of longitudinal coverage from infancy through 36 months, repeated interaction sessions, clinically validated developmental outcomes, expert frame-level behavioral annotations, and privacy-conscious multimodal feature representations. To the best of our knowledge, existing ASD behavioral datasets do not jointly provide these characteristics at comparable scale. To demonstrate the utility of ASD-FEAT, we use it to evaluate a computer-vision-based end-to-end pipeline relying on machine learning techniques to automatically identify ASD risk. ASD-FEAT integrates both expert-defined and deep-learned features, including face and eye landmarks, facial action units, gaze direction, head position, mel-spectrogram audio representations, and optical flow, to identify behavioral markers of social interaction. Our automated pipeline…