Self-stimulatory Behavior Dataset

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), often referred to as autism, are neurological disorders characterised by deficits in cognitive skills, social and communicative behaviours. A common way of diagnosing ASD is by studying behavioural cues expressed by the children.

We introduce a new publicly available dataset (SSBD) of children videos exhibiting self-stimulatory (‘stimming’) behaviours commonly used in autism diagnosis. These videos, posted by parents/caregivers on public domain websites, are collected and annotated for the stimming behaviours.

These videos are extremely challenging for automatic behaviour analysis as they are recorded in uncontrolled natural settings. The dataset contains 75 videos with an average duration of 90 seconds per video, grouped under three categories of stimming behaviours:

• arm flapping,
• head banging, and
• spinning.