Application of speech recognition technology in the automatic recognition of cough sounds

Abstract

Objective To investigate the feasibility of speech recognition technologies including double threshold method, Mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) and vector quantization (VQ) in automatic recognition of cough sounds. Methods Five healthy adults and 15 patients with cough were recruited for recording of both non- cough and cough sounds in a quiet environment. The records were randomized into training and testing samples. The training samples were used to generate the code book for cough recognition software, which was then used to recognize and analyze the testing samples automatically.The sensitivity and specificity of recognition were calculated by comparison with outcomes from human ear recognition. The recognition time in two approaches was recorded. Results Two hundred cough and 200 noncough sound samples were used to generate the code book for cough recognition software, while 375 cough sound samples and 125 non-cough sound samples were used as the testing samples. The recognition time of the testing samples needed was 33 minutes and 18 seconds by human ear recognition vs 1 minute and 35seconds by code book-based automatic recognition. In addition, the sensitivity and specificity in code bookbased automatic recognition of the cough sound were 98.93% and 100% respectively. Conclusion The double threshold method based on VQ and MFCC appears feasible in automatic recognition of cough sounds. Key words: Cough; Speech recognition software; Pattern recognition, automatic; Sensitivity and specificity; Human ear recognition