Baby Cry Detection: Deep Learning and Classical Approaches

In this chapter, we compare deep learning and classical approaches for detection of baby cry sounds in various domestic environments under challenging signal-to-noise ratio conditions. Automatic cry detection has applications in commercial products (such as baby remote monitors) as well as in medical and psycho-social research. We design and evaluate several convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures for baby cry detection, and compare their performance to that of classical machine-learning approaches, such as logistic regression and support vector machines. In addition to feed-forward CNNs, we analyze the performance of recurrent neural network (RNN) architectures, which are able to capture temporal behavior of acoustic events. We show that by carefully designing CNN architectures with specialized non-symmetric kernels, better results are obtained compared to common CNN architectures.