Manual Versus Automated: The Challenging Routine of Infant Vocalisation Segmentation in Home Videos to Study Neuro(mal)development

Florian B. Pokorny, Robert Peharz, Wolfgang Roth, Matthias Zöhrer, Franz Pernkopf, Peter B. Marschik, Bjorn W. Schuller

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference paperpeer-review

Abstract

In recent years, voice activity detection has been a highly researched field, due to its importance as input stage in many real-world applications. Automated detection of vocalisations in the very first year of life is still a stepchild of this field. On our quest defining acoustic parameters in pre-linguistic vocalisations as markers for neuro(mal)development, we are confronted with the challenge of manually segmenting and annotating hours of variable quality home video material for sequences of infant voice/vocalisations. While in total our corpus comprises video footage of typically developing infants and infants with various neurodevelopmental disorders of more than a year running time, only a small proportion has been processed so far. This calls for automated assistance tools for detecting and/or segmenting infant utterances from real-live video recordings. In this paper, we investigated several approaches of infant voice detection and segmentation, including a rule-based voice activity detector, hidden Markov models with Gaussian mixture observation models, support vector machines, and random forests. Results indicate that the applied methods could be well applied in a semi-automated retrieval of infant utterances from highly non-standardised footage. At the same time, our results show that, a fully automated approach for this problem is yet to come.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH
Pages2997 - 3001
VolumeVolume 08-12-September-2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2016
Event17th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association: INTERSPEECH 2016 - San Francisco, United States
Duration: 8 Sept 201616 Sept 2016

Conference

Conference17th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Francisco
Period8/09/1616/09/16

Cooperations

  • BioTechMed-Graz

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Manual Versus Automated: The Challenging Routine of Infant Vocalisation Segmentation in Home Videos to Study Neuro(mal)development'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this