Infant cry language analysis and recognition: an experimental approach

Abstract

Recently, lots of research has been directed towards natural language processing. However, the baby &#x02BC s cry, which serves as the primary means of communication for infants, has not yet been extensively explored, because it is not a language that can be easily understood. Since cry signals carry information about a babies &#x02BC wellbeing and can be understood by experienced parents and experts to an extent, recognition and analysis of an infant &#x02BC s cry is not only possible, but also has profound medical and societal applications. In this paper, we obtain and analyze audio features of infant cry signals in time and frequency domains. Based on the related features, we can classify given cry signals to specific cry meanings for cry language recognition. Features extracted from audio feature space include linear predictive coding &#x0028 LPC &#x0029, linear predictive cepstral coefficients &#x0028 LPCC &#x0029, Bark frequency cepstral coefficients &#x0028 BFCC &#x0029, and Mel frequency cepstral coefficients &#x0028 MFCC &#x0029. Compressed sensing technique was used for classification and practical data were used to design and verify the proposed approaches. Experiments show that the proposed infant cry recognition approaches offer accurate and promising results.