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Autism is a developmental disorder associated with difficulties in communication and social interaction. Currently, the gold standard in autism diagnosis is the autism diagnostic observation schedule (ADOS) interviews that assign a score indicating the level of severity for each individual. However, current researchers investigate developing objective technologies to diagnose autism employing brain image modalities. One of such image modalities is task-based functional MRI which exhibits alterations in functional activity that is believed to be important in explaining autism causative factors. Although autism is defined over a wide spectrum, previous diagnosis approaches only divide subjects into normal or autistic. In this paper, a novel framework for grading the severity level of autistic subjects using task-based fMRI data is presented. A speech experiment is used to obtain local features related to the functional …