Paper ID: 2410.09236

Enhancing Infant Crying Detection with Gradient Boosting for Improved Emotional and Mental Health Diagnostics

Kyunghun Lee, Lauren M. Henry, Eleanor Hansen, Elizabeth Tandilashvili, Lauren S. Wakschlag, Elizabeth Norton, Daniel S. Pine, Melissa A. Brotman, Francisco Pereira

Infant crying can serve as a crucial indicator of various physiological and emotional states. This paper introduces a comprehensive approach for detecting infant cries within audio data. We integrate Meta's Wav2Vec with traditional audio features, such as Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), chroma, and spectral contrast, employing Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM) for cry classification. We validate our approach on a real-world dataset, demonstrating significant performance improvements over existing methods.

Submitted: Oct 11, 2024