AI distinguishes the meaning of crying babies?

Baby cries make parents worry. It is said that a study is underway to understand these baby crying sounds using AI and to distinguish between normal and strange crying sounds.

Crying when your baby is hungry, sick, or feeling unwell. Of course, they also cry to get their parents’ attention. I think experienced parents or experts can understand the meaning of crying babies to some extent, so they can accurately recognize the meaning of crying sounds. However, the research team of Professor Lichuan Liu of Electrical Engineering at Northern Illinois University is conducting research to analyze the voice characteristics in the frequency domain of the crying sound of infants with various meanings and to recognize the reason why infants are crying.

The research team uses linear predictive coding to extract sound features in the form of MFCC (Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient) from the crying sound of infants. In addition, it efficiently processes large amounts of data extracted through compression sensing. If voice data is recorded in a noisy environment, necessary and unnecessary elements are mixed, making it difficult to process. However, compression sensing helps to process voice data mixed with noise through the process of reconstructing signals based on irregular data.

By processing these data, the research team succeeded in developing a new algorithm based on automatic speech recognition that can detect and recognize the cry of infants. This algorithm distinguishes between normal crying and strange crying. Of course, rather than specializing in recognizing infants’ crying, they can read the universal meaning of infants’ crying.

This algorithm can be used as a way to better understand why infants cry and how urgent crying sounds. The research team said that a lot of health-related information exists in various crying sounds like a special language, and this difference is expressed by the difference in the characteristics of the crying sound. It says there is a need to gather information. Related information can be found here .