Significance of Higher-Order Spectral Analysis in Infant Cry Classification

In this paper, higher-order spectral analysis is applied to infant cry signals for classification of normal infant cries from pathological infant cries. From the family of higher-order spectra, bispectrum is considered for the proposed task. Bispectrum is the Fourier transform of the third-order cumulant function. To extract features from the bispectrum, application of higher-order singular value decomposition theorem is proposed. Experimental results show the average classification accuracy of $${82.44} \pm {4.03}{ \%}$$82.44±4.03% and Matthew’s correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.62 with proposed bispectrum features. In all of the experiments reported in this paper, support vector machine with radial basis function kernel is used as the pattern classifier. Performance of the proposed features is also compared with the state-of-the-art methods such as linear frequency cepstral coefficients, Mel frequency cepstral coefficients, perceptual linear prediction coefficients, linear prediction coefficients, linear prediction cepstral coefficients and perceptual linear prediction cepstral coefficients, and is found to be better than that given by these feature sets. The proposed bispectrum-based features are shown to be robust under signal degradation or noisy conditions at various SNR levels. Performance in the presence of noise is compared with the state-of-the-art spectral feature sets using MCC scores. In addition, effectiveness of cryunit segmentation in normal and pathological infant cry classification task is reported.