IMITASD: Imitation Assessment Model for Children with Autism Based on Human Pose Estimation

Autism is a challenging brain disorder affecting children at global and national scales. Applied behavior analysis is commonly conducted as an efficient medical therapy for children. This paper focused on one paradigm of applied behavior analysis, imitation, where children mimic certain lessons to enhance children’s social behavior and play skills. This paper introduces IMITASD, a practical monitoring assessment model designed to evaluate autistic children’s behaviors efficiently. The proposed model provides an efficient solution for clinics and homes equipped with mid-specification computers attached to webcams. IMITASD automates the scoring of autistic children’s videos while they imitate a series of lessons. The model integrates two core modules: attention estimation and imitation assessment. The attention module monitors the child’s position by tracking the child’s face and determining the head pose. The imitation module extracts a set of crucial key points from both the child’s head and arms to measure the similarity with a reference imitation lesson using dynamic time warping. The model was validated using a refined dataset of 268 videos collected from 11 Egyptian autistic children during conducting six imitation lessons. The analysis demonstrated that IMITASD provides fast scoring, takes less than three seconds, and shows a robust measure as it has a high correlation with scores given by medical therapists, about 0.9, highlighting its effectiveness for children’s training applications.