Abstract
The cry is a loud, high pitched verbal communication of infants. The very high fundamental frequency and resonance frequency characterize a neonatal infant cry having certain sudden variations. Furthermore, in a tiny duration solitary utterance, the cry signal also possesses both voiced and unvoiced features. Mostly, infants communicate with their caretakers through cries, and sometimes, it becomes difficult for the caretakers to comprehend the reason behind the newborn infant cry. As a result, this research proposes a novel work for classifying the newborn infant cries under three groups such as hunger, sleep, and discomfort. For each crying frame, twelve features get extracted through acoustic feature engineering, and the variable selection using random forests was used for selecting the highly discriminative features among the twelve time and frequency domain features. Subsequently, the extreme gradient boosting-powered grouped-support-vector network is deployed for neonate cry classification. The empirical results show that the proposed method could effectively classify the neonate cries under three different groups. The finest experimental results showed a mean accuracy of around 91% for most scenarios, and this exhibits the potential of the proposed extreme gradient boosting-powered grouped-support-vector network in neonate cry classification. Also, the proposed method has a fast recognition rate of 27 seconds in the identification of these emotional cries.
Highlights
Crying is the primary mode of communication among infants to make their care givers aware of their physiological and psychological necessities
The results revealed that Support vector machines (SVMs) performed better than KNN in terms of accuracy. e study could be further improved by including more types of infant cries and an extensive dataset that would help justify the superiority in the performance of the proposed approach
Sony HDR-PJ10 High Definition Camcorder was deployed to record the infant cries with a 44.1 kHz sampling rate of 16 bits of resolution. e distance between the infant’s mouth and the camcorder microphone was around 40 cm. e lengths of recorded infant cries were between 10 and 60 seconds. e infant cry measurement setup is illustrated in Figure 7. is research was approved and accepted by the ethical review committee from the National Cheng Kung University Human Research Ethics Committee. e parents of the infants had provided their written consensus for being a part of this study
Summary
Crying is the primary mode of communication among infants to make their care givers aware of their physiological and psychological necessities. It is the first expression of life at birth. E reasons behind infant crying can be numerous. A crying infant achieves the objective of attracting attention of the caregiver informing that the baby needs an interaction of some sort. E activity of crying is controlled by the brain and is triggered in case of any exceptional event occurring against the normal functioning of the infant’s body. It acts like an alarm to inform on any alternated event pertinent to the functioning of the body, being reflected as a cry. It acts like an alarm to inform on any alternated event pertinent to the functioning of the body, being reflected as a cry. e event of crying encompasses sequences of motor skill performances along with acoustic expressions such as vocalization, coughing-choking, constrictive silence, and various combinations of these manifestations
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