Automatic classification of infant cry: A review

Abstract

This paper reviews the some of significant works on infant cry signal analysis proposed in the past two decades and reviews the recent progress in this field. The cry of baby cannot be predicted accurately where it is very hard to identify for what it cries for. Experienced parents and specialists in the area of child care such as pediatrician and pediatric nurse can distinguish different sort of cries by just making use their individual perception on auditory sense. This is totally subjective evaluation and not suitable for clinical use. Non-invasive method has been widely used in infant cry signal analysis and has shown very promising results. Various feature extraction and classification algorithms used in infant cry analysis are briefly described. This review gives an insight on the current state of the art works in infant cry signal analysis and concludes with thoughts about the future directions for better representation and interpretation of infant cry signals.