Automatic detection of the expiratory and inspiratory phases in newborn cry signals

•The paper presents a segmentation system of newborn cry signals based on Hidden Markov Models.•The proposed system is able to detect the audible expiratory and inspiratory parts from other acoustic activities.•Experimental results show the effect of certain parameters on the performance of the proposed system.

An analysis of newborn cry signals, either for the early diagnosis of neonatal health problems or to determine the category of a cry (e.g., pain, discomfort, birth cry, and fear), requires a primary and preliminary preprocessing step to quantify the important expiratory and inspiratory parts of the audio recordings of newborn cries. Data typically contain clean cries interspersed with sections of other sounds (generally, the sounds of speech, noise, or medical equipment) or silence. The purpose of signal segmentation is to differentiate the important acoustic parts of the cry recordings from the unimportant acoustic activities that compose the audio signals. This paper reports on our research to establish an automatic segmentation system for newborn cry recordings based on Hidden Markov Models using the HTK (Hidden Markov Model Toolkit). The system presented in this report is able to detect the two basic constituents of a cry, which are the audible expiratory and inspiratory parts, using a two-stage recognition architecture. The system is trained and tested on a real database collected from normal and pathological newborns. The experimental results indicate that the system yields accuracies of up to 83.79%.