Classification of Infant Cries with Asphyxia Using Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network

Asphyxia occurs in infants with neurological level disturbance, which is found to affect sound of cry produced by infants. The infant cry signals with asphyxia have distinct patterns which can be recognized with pattern classifiers such as Artificial Neural Network (ANN). This study investigates the performance of the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifier in discriminating between healthy and infants with asphyxia from their cries, of ages from zero to seven months old, with an input feature reduction algorithm, Orthogonal Lest Square (OLS) analysis, in contrast to direct selection. The infant cry waveform served as input to Mel Frequency Cepstrum (MFC) analysis for feature extraction. The MLP classifier performance was examined with different combination in number of coefficients, filter bank and hidden nodes. It is found that the OLS algorithm is effective in enhancing the accuracy of MLP classifier while reducing the computation load. Both the average and highest MLP classification accuracies with coefficients being ranked by OLS algorithm have consistently displayed better score than those by direct selection. The highest MLP classification accuracy of 94% is obtained with 40 filter banks, 12 highly ranked MFC coefficients and 15 hidden nodes.