A Robust Tool for Newborn Infant Cry Analysis

In this paper, a new robust adaptive tool for new born infant cry analysis is proposed, characterised by high tracking capability, well suited for the signals under study. It performs F noise and resonance frequencies tracking, on signal frames of varying length (even few ms), adaptively tailored to varying signal characteristics. Moreover, voiced/unvoiced separation is implemented, allowing disregarding unvoiced parts of the signal where misleading results could be obtained. Plots of F and its harmonics, noise tracking, spectrogram with resonance frequencies superimposed, are presented in a coloured-scale. Some added statistics allow further understanding and comparison of results. The new software tool is completely automatic, working with any sampling frequency and F and also with strongly corrupted signals, and does not need any manual setting of whatever option to be made by the user, thus being easily usable also by non-experts. Some examples are reported, concerning both healthy and pathological new-born infant cries