This study discusses the face recognition of children with special needs, especially those with autism. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder that affects social skills, ways of interacting, and communication disorders. Facial recognition in autistic children is needed to help detect autism quickly to minimize the risk of further complications. There is extraordinarily little research on facial recognition of autistic children, and the resulting system is not fully accurate. This research proposes using the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model using two architectures: ShuffleNet, which uses randomization channels, and Visual Geometry Group (VGG)-19, which has 19 layers for the classification process. The research object used in the face recognition system is secondary data obtained through the Kaggle site with a total of 2,940 image data consisting of images of autism and non-autism. The faces of autistic children are visually difficult to distinguish from those of normal children. Therefore, this system was built to recognize the faces of people with autism. The method used in this research is applying the CNN model to autism face recognition through images by comparing two architectures to see their best performance. Autism and non-autism data are grouped into training data, 2,540, and test data, as much as 300. In the training stage, the data was validated using validation data consisting of 50 autism image data and 50 non-autism image data. The experimental results show that the VGG-19 has high accuracy at 98%, while ShuffleNet is 88%.