Infant cry signal is a biomedical acoustic signal that is usually high-pitched. Infant cry is his only means of communication, production of which involves significant changes in its characteristics. Possibly rapid changes in its short-time segments carry information about the cause of cry, that a mother can perceive. The instantaneous fundamental frequency (Fo) of infant cries is much higher than for adults, necessitating different signal processing methods for infant cry signals' analyses. In this paper, the production characteristics of infant cry signals due to pain vs. discomfort are discriminated, exploring features that may help towards developing automated diagnostic systems. Production features the F0, strength of excitation (SoE) and signal energy (E) are used, for analysing ‘Infant Cry Signals Database’ collected for the study. The excitation source characteristics are derived using a modified zero-frequency filtering method. Spectrograms of the acoustic signal and the excitation source characteristics are compared to validate the changes in the features. Larger fluctuations in the features F0, SoE and E are observed for infant cry due to pain, than due to discomfort.
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