A Confidence-Constrained Cloud-Edge Collaborative Framework for Autism Spectrum Disorder Diagnosis

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis systems in school environments increasingly relies on IoT-enabled cameras, yet pure cloud processing raises privacy and latency concerns while pure edge inference suffers from limited accuracy. We propose Confidence-Constrained Cloud-Edge Knowledge Distillation (C3EKD), a hierarchical framework that performs most inference at the edge and selectively uploads only low-confidence samples to the cloud. The cloud produces temperature-scaled soft labels and distils them back to edge models via a global loss aggregated across participating schools, improving generalization without centralizing raw data. On two public ASD facial-image datasets, the proposed framework achieves a superior accuracy of 87.4\%, demonstrating its potential for scalable deployment in real-world applications.