CHAPTER -1

1. INTRODUCTION
About 130 million babies are born globally each year. Taking good care of newborns is a
big challenge, espe cially for first time parents. Following the suggestions from other
parents and books is not enough to solve the problems in practice. The main reason is
because it is difficult to understand the meaning of the infant cries. Infants communicate
with the world through cry ing. Experienced parents, caregivers, doctors, and nurses
understand the cries based on their experiences. Young parents get frustrated and have
trouble calming down their babies because all cry signals sound the same to them.
Accurately interpreting infants’ cry sound can help parents take better care of their
babies. Research on infant cry started as early as 1960swhenWasz–Hockertresearch
group identified the four types of the cries (pain, hunger, birth, and pleasure) auditorily
by trained nurses [1].

the early years, researches have determined that different types of cries can be
differentiated auditorily by trained adult listeners. But training human perception for
infant cry is much harder than training machine learning mod els. In Mukhopadhyay’s
study, the highest classification accuracy by training a group of people to recognize some
cry sounds is 33.09% while machine learning algorithm based on spectral and prosodic
features can recognize the same set of data and reach 80.56% accuracy [2]. Building
smart machines to understand infant cry leads the way to build intelligent robot
caregivers in the future. Besides understanding infants’ daily life needs, disease predic
tion is another critical task in infant cry research. Since infants’ vocal tract and breathing
system are affected by some diseases, the cry signals of unhealthy infants con tain unique
characteristics that differ from healthy cry signals. Known examples of such diseases
include deaf, autism, and asphyxia, etc. Analyzing pathological cry sig nals to identify
diseases is a non-invasive and fast method that can save infants’ lives, especially in the
areas that lack of medical equipment and expertise. In the early years of infant cry
research, many works have focused on classifying normal and pathological cry signals.
In Saraswathy’s review [3], 34 papers on classification of nor mal and pathological cry
signals published from 2003 to 2011 are listed. The works include identifying dis eases
such as hypo-acoustic, asphyxia, hypothyroidism, hyperbilirubinemia, cleft palate, etc.
Infant cry research involves data collection, cry signal processing, feature extraction and
selection, and classifi cation. Due to the sensitivity of cry data, it has been dif ficult for
researchers to acquire data needed. Researchers either record cry clips by themselves or
ask permis sions for datasets from other authors. Most databases are recorded in hospital,
Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), home, and clinics, etc. by recording in real time or
by setting up electronic recording devices close to the infants’ crib for long period of
time. Signal processing is a must to remove background noises and perform cry
segmentation to build cry databases. Once the database is available, feature extraction is
the step to extract fea tures from different domains of the cry signals. Features extracted
from time domain, cepstral domain, or prosodic domain, etc. represent different aspects
of the cry signal. Selecting the most appropriate features and reducing the feature
dimensions are another task to build effective clas sification models. Applying
appropriate machine learning models for specific cry features is vital for classification or
detection accuracy. As the second Artificial Intelligence (AI) winter ends in 1990s [4],
neural networks emerge as a popular method in infant cry research. Neural net works are
computing system, containing interconnected neurons, inspired by biological brain
system. Input vec tors, neurons, weights, activation functions, and output are the main
elements in a neural network. Each neuron has a value computed in the forward
propagation process based on the weights of each connection and bias of each layer.
Activation functions are used to achieve nonlinear ity in the network. The back
propagation is the key algo rithm to train the model and minimize the loss function,
which evaluates how well the model fits the dataset. Dur ing the 2000s, most methods
adopted in infant research are related to neural networks including scaled conjugate
gradient neural network, multi-layer perceptron, general regression neural network,
evolutionary neural network, probabilistic neural network, neuro-fuzzy network, and
Time Delay Neural network, etc. Hidden Markov model and Support Vector Machine
(SVM) were also adopted in the 2000s. In the recent decade, many traditional machine
learning methods, such as SVM, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Gaussian Mixture Model
(GMM), fuzzy classi fier, logistic regression, K-means clustering, and Random Forest,
are applied to pathological cry classification, cry reason classification, and cry sound
detection. In the

same period, novel neural network architectures are used pervasively in industry and
research. Convolutional Neu ral Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN),
CNN-RNN, Capsule Net, Reservoir Network, and neuro fuzzy networks open a new
chapter in infant cry research. This survey reviews infant cry research mainly focus ing
on the signal processing techniques and machine learning methods developed in the past
decade. We first review typical databases used in the research, then intro duce pre-
processing approaches of infant cry signals, and describe a diversity of features either in
time domain or in frequency domain as well as suprasegmental features of infant cry
signals. We focus on reviewing the state-of-the art methods using KNN, SVM, GMM,
and CNN-based algorithms for classification and detection. We provide a list of
resources for the researchers who are interested to work in this domain, and finally we
make a point of the future work in this research area.
 CHAPTER -2

2. DATA ACQUISITION

As shown in Fig. 1, automatic infant cry research gener ally involves five stages: data
acquisition, pre-processing, feature extraction, feature selection, and classification.
Discovering novel methods in any of the stages can help improve the performance of the
final classification accuracy. The data acquisition stage includes recording the infant cry
sounds and labeling. Most databases are recorded in hospitals or homes, labeled by
doctors, nurses, or parents. Digital recorders are placed close to infants and are either
operated on the spot to capture the cry signals one by one or left on to record the sound
events around the infants for a long period of time. Infant sound is a short-term
stationary signal, and it is assumed to be more stationary becauseof infants’ lackof
fullcontrolof thevocal tract. Due to the limitation of resources and sensitivity of infant
cry data collection process, the total amount of infant cry database is very limited. From
the previous review papers [3, 5, 6], we canseethatthemostcommonlyuseddatabase in
infant cry research is Baby Chillanto database [7]. Baby Chillanto database was collected
by the National Insti tute of Astrophysics and Optical Electronics, CONACYT Mexico
[8]. It contains five types of cry signals includ ing deaf, asphyxia, normal, hungry, and
pain. Each cry is equally segmented into 1-s long and the total number of cries is 2268.
Anotherdatabaseusedinmultipleliteratures is named Dunstan Baby Language database
[9], which is extracted from the Dunstan baby video tutorial presented by Priscilla
Dunstan who invented the Dunstan Baby Lan guage theory. There are several versions of
Dunstan Baby Language database since authors extracted the audio clips in their own
ways. The version described in [9] consists of 315 wave files, sampled at 16 kHz, with a
variable length between 0.3 and 1.6 s. Each utterance is a word of infant
 CHAPTER -3

3. SIGNAL PROCESSING AND FEATURE GENERTION

3.1 Pre – processing
The main tasks in pre-processing stage are denoising and audio segmentation. The
complication of the record ing environment leads to unclean infant cry signals. In a
neonatal care unit, besides infant cry signals, there could be manykinds of sounds such as
footsteps, adult’s speech, air-conditioner sound, alarm sound, etc. To detect or clas sify
cry signals accurately, cleaning up the recorded data at the pre-processing stage is a
crucial step. To clean up a signal, the first task is denoising, which removes the
background sounds such as speech, fan, footstep, etc. Turan and Erzin applied high-pass
FIR filter to remove the speech sound and low frequency noise in the record ing [41].
Ferretti et al. reduced coherent noise source by a filter-and-sum beamformer and uses
OMLSApost-filter to reduce the residual diffuse noise [18]. In [16], Gu et al. used
optimized Blackman window to handle each frame signal, which is the result after the
endpoint detection. The signal noise is significantly reduced after filtering. Audio
segmentation task is commonly performed using Voice Activity Detection (VAD). VAD
technique is widely used in speech recognition to detect the human speech in audio
signals. Researchers also use it to detect the infant cry and remove the silent duration in a
sample record ing. VADalsofaces the challenge of separating the cry and noise. Pan et al.
uses it to detect the presence or absence of baby cry in a noisy environment to improve
the overall baby cry recognition rate [56] and it is used to detect the sections of the audio
with sufficient audio activity [57]. In [41], authors implemented a basic VAD algorithm,
which uses short-time features of audio frames and a decision strategy for determining
sound and silence frames. Some times researchers also manually cutthesamplestoremove
the silent part and the voice interference part, and only the continuous crying part of the
sound was retained [51]. 3.2 Featureextractio

3.2 Feature extraction

Infant cry signal differs from adult speech. Figure 2 gives a comparison of spectrograms
between infant sound and adult speech. We can see that the variations within wave form
andspectrogram are quite different, especially in the areas of energy, intensity, and
formants. In general, infant cry is a combination of vocalization, silence, coughing,
choking, and interruptions, which includes a diversity of acoustic and prosodic
information at different levels. It is the only way for babies to communicate with the
world.