Background/Objectives: One of the key challenges in autism is early diagnosis. Early diagnosis leads to early interventions that improve the condition and not worsen autism in the future. Currently, autism diagnoses are based on monitoring by a doctor or specialist after the child reaches a certain age exceeding three years after the parents observe the child's abnormal behavior. Methods: The paper aims to find another way to diagnose autism that is effective and earlier than traditional methods of diagnosis. Therefore, we used the Eye Gaze fixes map dataset and Eye Tracking Scanpath dataset (ETSDS) to diagnose Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASDs), while a subset of the ETSDS was used to recognize autism scores. Results: The experimental results showed that the higher accuracy rate reached 96.1% and 98.0% for the hybrid model on Eye Gaze fixes map datasets and ETSDS, respectively. A higher accuracy rate was reached (98.1%) on the ETSDS used to recognize autism scores. Furthermore, the results showed the outperformer for the proposed method results compared to previous works. Conclusions: This confirms the effectiveness of using artificial intelligence techniques in diagnosing diseases in general and diagnosing autism, in addition to the need to increase research in the field of diagnosing diseases using advanced techniques.
Keywords: ASD diagnosis; MobileNet; deep learning; hybrid learning; image classification; image processing; machine learning; stacking ensemble learning.