Spectral analysis of infant cries and adult speech

Abstract

In this paper, spectrographic analysis of the infant cries is reported. For the spectrographic analysis of the infant cries ten different cry modes are used to analyze differences in different pathological cries. A comparison of spectrograms of the adult speech signal and infant cry signals is given. Based on differences in the distribution of energy in the spectrograms, energy-based features are calculated from the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) of the adult speech and infant cry signals. The classification performance of these features is obtained using support vector machine (SVM) classifier and it is observed that the energy distribution in 0---1 kHz range is promising feature in the classification of adult speech and infant cries and the classification accuracy achieved with this feature is 98.22 %. On the contrary, it was observed that it is very difficult to classify adult speech and infant cries using the energy distribution in 1---3 kHz.