2009 5th International Colloquium on Signal Processing & Its Applications (CSPA)

An Investigation into Infant Cry and Apgar Score

Using Principle Component Analysis
Rohilah Sahak, Wahidah Mansor, Lee Yoot Khuan, Azlee Zabidi, Farah Yasmin
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University Technology Mara,
40450 Shah Alam,
Selangor

Abstract - In this paper, the cry characteristics of newborn immediate medical care. This scoring system includes 5
infant were investigated and correlated with Apgar score. The components; heart rate, respiratory effort, muscle tone, reflex
Apgar score is a rapid method to evaluate the physical condition irritability and color, which is each of them is given a score of
of newborn infants at 1 and 5 minutes after birth, and may be 0, 1 or 2. The Apgar score is the sum of the 5 components.
repeated later if the score is and remains low. The cry of
Scores 3 and below are regarded as critically low, 4 to 6 fairly
premature and mature infants with low and normal Apgar scores
was analyzed using principle component analysis (PCA). Pre- low, and 7 to 10 generally normal. Premature infants are more
processing of the voice or unvoiced segments of cry signals to have low Apgar scores (i.e 3 and below) than normal
include zero rate crossing, short time energy and filtering. infants [7].
Through principle component analysis, the reduced dimension This paper presents principal component analysis (PCA) of
cry signal is investigated to extract features to be correlated with mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) computed from
Apgar scores. This work provides the foundation for the design infant cries with low and high Apgar scores. It reveals the
of an automatic algorithm to replace the manual Apgar scoring differences in the PCA results between the low and high
system. Apgar scores.
I. INTRODUCTION
II. ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES
The crying of infants is the sign of life after birth and the
A. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC)
first tool of communication. It involves characteristics of
MFCC is used to encode signal [8].The steps involved in
vocalizations, facial expressions and limb movements [1]. As
this process are frame blocking, windowing, fast fourier
an adult speech, infant cry used to communicate about their
transform (FFT), mel – frequency wrapping and cepstrum.
needs or problem. Previous researchers state that infant cry
In frame blocking, the signal is blocked into frames. Then,
consists of useful information regarding the physical,
hamming window is applied for each individual frame so that
psychological and pathological state of the infant. It has been
the signal discontinuities at the beginning and end of each
shown that there exist significant differences among the
frame can be minimized. The next step is the Fast Fourier
various types of crying, like healthy infant cry, pain cry and
Transform, which converts each frame from the time domain
pathological cry [2, 3]. Infants at medical risk such as
into the frequency domain. The FFT is a fast algorithm to
premature infants or infants with metabolic disturbances cry at
implement the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT).
higher frequency than normal. That indicates the infants may
Human perception of the frequency contents of sounds
have problem and need immediate medical treatment.
for speech signals does not follow a linear scale. Thus for
Many researchers analyze cries to relate with disease.
each tone with an actual frequency, a subjective pitch is
They used various analysis techniques such as auditory
measured on a scale called the ‘mel’ scale. The mel-frequency
analysis, time domain analysis, frequency domain,
scale is linear frequency spacing below 1000Hz and a
spectrographic and computer – based analysis. Michelsson et
logarithmic spacing above 1000Hz. As a reference point, the
al. [4] defined healthy and unhealthy cry types by
pitch of a 1kHz tone, 40dB above the perceptual hearing
spectrography. They introduced modified spectrogram to
threshold, is defined as 1000 mels. Therefore, equation (1) can
analyse infant cries with hypothyroidism, asphyxia or
be used to compute the mels for a given frequency, f in Hz [9].
meningitis. Schonweiler et al. [1, 5, 6] investigated the cries of
hearing impaired infants. They found differences in the
mel(f)= 2595*log10(1+f/700). (1)
duration of the cry signals between 3 healthy infants and 4
infants with hearing diseases.
To simulate the subjective spectrum filter bank is used,
The clinical status of newborn infant is assessed at 1 and
one filter for each desired mel frequency component. The
5 minutes after birth using a scoring system known as Apgar
filter bank has a triangular bandpass frequency response, and
score. This score may be repeated later if the score is and
the spacing as well as the bandwidth is determined by a
remains low. The method was designed to help doctors or
constant mel-frequency interval [9]. In the final step, the log
nurses to assess an overall physical condition of newborn so
mel spectrum are convert back into time. The result is called
that they could quickly determine whether the baby needed
the mel frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCCs). Actually,

978-1-4244-4152-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE 209

the mel spectrum coefficients can convert to the time domain
using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) since the
coefficient represents as a real number. The MFCCs can be
calculated using (2) [9, 10, 11].
K
1 
cn 
~ ~
 (log S k )[n(k  ) ]
k 1 2 K
where S is the log energy output of the kth filter, and
n=1,2,….M.
The number of mel cepstrum coefficients, K, is typically
~ Cry Signal
chosen as 20. The first component, c 0
, is excluded from the
DCT since it represents the mean value of the log energy of
the frame which carries little speaker specific information.
B. Principal Component Analysis
Principal component analysis is a variable reduction
procedure. It is useful when there is some redundancy in the
some of variables. In this case, redundancy means that some
of the variables are correlated with one another, Because of
this redundancy, it should be possible to reduce the observed
variables into a smaller number of principal components that
will account for most of the variance in the observed variables.
This technique has three effects; it orthogonalizes the
components of the input vectors, it orders the resulting
orthogonal components (Principal Components or PC) so that
those with the largest variation come first, and it eliminates
those components that contribute the least to the variation in
the data set [2].
The most important thing in this analysis is to eliminate
which components or coefficient so that no information lost
will occur. There are three ways to evaluate significant
information in the components; eigenvalue – one criterion,
scree test and cumulative percent of variance.
In the eigenvalue – one criterion and scree test, an
eigenvalue which represents the amount of variance that is
accounted for by a given component, is computed. The
eigenvalue – one criterion, also known as Kaiser criterion,
[12] states component with an eigenvalue greater than 1 will
be retained, while the component less than 1 are viewed as a
trivial. The scree test creates a plot to display eigenvalue
associated with each component. The use of scree test must be
supplemented with additional criteria, [12] such as explained
variances and eigenvalue – one criterion. When researchers
use the cumulative percent of variance as the criterion for
solving the number-of components problem, they usually
retain enough components so that the cumulative percent of
variance accounted for at least 70% (and sometimes 80%)
[12]. The percent of variance accounted for can be calculated
using:
Var percentage= 100* Variances of the Coefficient
Total Variance.
III. METHODOLOGY
Two types of infant cries were used in this study,
premature cries (with Apgar score of 3 and below) and healthy
cries (with Apgar score of 7 and above). These infant’s cries
were obtained from
(2) http://www.disat.unimib.it/bioacoustics/en/soundcry.html.
There are two stages involve in the investigation; pre-
processing and analysis stages (see Fig. 1). In both stages, the
algorithms were developed using Matlab 7.6.0 (R2008a).
Filtering Process
Pre – Processing
STFT analysis
Segmentation
MFCC Analysis
Analysis
Principal
Component
Analysis
End
Fig. 1. Overall process for analyzing cries with high and low Apgar scores.
A. Pre – processing
In the pre-processing stage, the cry signals were sampled
at 44.1 kHz and filtered using bandpass filters. The frequency
range of the bandpass filters for both cases was different since
the frequency of the cries for high and low Apgar scores were
different. For high Apgar score, the frequency of bandpass
filter used was 400 – 2080 Hz whereas for low Apgar score, it
was 500 – 1550 Hz. Short time Fourier transform (STFT) was
computed to determine the frequency contents of the signals
before and after filtering. After bandpass filtering, the signals
were segmented using short time energy and zero crossing
rate. This is done to detect the start and end of each segment.
B. Analysis
The segmented signals were then analyzed using MFCC.
Each 1 second segment was first multiplied by a hamming
window having a width of 16 ms and the successive frames
were overlapped by 50%. Then its energy spectrum was
calculated using fast Fourier transform (FFT). This spectrum
was then converted to mel-spectrum by passing it through
triangular filters. The MFCC filter banks used are shown in
(3)
Figure 2. The bank consists of 40 filters, 25 linearly spaced
between 0 Hz and 4.7 kHz and 15 log-space between 5 kHz
and 22.5 kHz. Finally, MFCC was computed and 10
coefficients were extracted.
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 Mel-spaced filterbank 0.6
2 0.4

0.2

1.8

Amplitude
0

-0.2

1.6 -0.4

-0.6

1.4 -0.8
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
Time (s)

1.2
6000

1 5000

Frequency (Hz)
4000

0.8 3000

2000

1000
0.6 0
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9
Time (s)

0.4
Fig. 4. Cry signal with low Apgar score and its spectrogram after filtering
0.2

0
0 0.5 1 1.5
Frequency (Hz)
Fig.2. The MFCC Filter Bank used in the analysis
To eliminate redundancy in the results of MFCC, PCA was
conducted on all 10 coefficients. The eigenvalue – one criterion
and scree test were performed to determine the eigenvalue for
each MFCC. In the eigenvalue – one criterion, MFCC that have
eigenvalue that is greater than one is retained. In the scree test,
the principal components of the MFCC were selected based on
2 2.5
A. Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficient (MFCC)
4
x 10 The MFCC features obtained from cries with low and
high Apgar scores are shown in Fig. 5 and Fig. 6. Note that the
amplitude of the coefficients 2 to 8 for high Apgar score is
below 10 dB. Only coefficients 9 and 10 have amplitudes
between 10 to 20 dB. The MFCC features of low Apgar scores
encompasses different pattern compared to high Apgar Scores.
High energy (amplitude approaches 20 dB) can be observed
from the MFCC feature starting from coefficients 6 to 10.
MFCCs

large eigenvalues. Coefficients that have smaller eigenvalues

were removed as their significant in the data decreases. In order 100

to confirm the results obtained from the scree test, the analysis 80

of the cumulative percent of variance was then performed.

60

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

40
Amplitude

20

A sample of cry signal with low Apgar score and its 0

spectrogram before and after filtering are shown in Fig. 3 and -20

4 respectively. It is obvious that after filtering the frequency -40

140
components above 1550 Hz have been removed. The 120
100
fundamental frequency of cries for low Apgar score infant is 80
60 8
9
10

577 - 1168 Hz whereas for high Apgar score, it is 500-594 Hz, 40

20 4
5
6
7

3
which is in agreement with those reported by Wasz et al [13]. Length of Frame
0 1
2

Coefficient

0.2 Fig. 5. MFCC feature of high Apgar score

0.15

0.1 MFCCs
Amplitude

0.05

-0.05

-0.1
100
-0.15
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
Time (s)
80

14000
60
12000

10000
40
Frequency (Hz)

Amplitude

8000

6000
20
4000

2000 0
0
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9
Time (s)
-20

Fig. 3. Cry signal with low Apgar score and its spectrogram -40
140
120
100 10
9
80 8
7
60 6
40 5
4
20 3
2
0 1
Length of Frame
Coefficient

Fig. 6. MFCC feature of low Apgar score

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B. Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
Table 1 and 2 show the eigenvalues for high (normal cry)
and low (premature cry) Apgar score infant respectively. In
high Apgar score, the eigenvalue for coefficient 1 is 3.461
whereas the eigenvalue for coefficient 2 is 2.465. This
variation is consistent with the earlier statement that the first
components extracted tend to account for relatively large
amounts of variance, while the later components account for
relatively smaller amounts. Table 2 also shows the same
variation. The total of eigenvalue for both cases is exactly the
the sixth coefficient to the tenth coefficient, there is small
difference in eigenvalues. In low apgar score, a large
difference occurred between coefficient 1 and 8. Note that
there is a relatively small difference between coefficient 8 and
10. These coefficients are regarded as trivial. The differences
in eigenvalues for both cases can be observed clearly in Fig. 8.
The scree test results suggest that coefficients 1 to 6 for high
Apgar score and coefficients 1 to 8 for low Apgar score should
be retained.
The Scree Test

same as the total number of coefficient, 10 and the total of 3.5

High Apgar Score
proportion is equal to 1. Low Apgar Score
3

TABLE 1
HIGH APGAR SCORE (NORMAL INFANT CRY) 2.5

Coefficient Eigenvalue Difference Proportion Cumulative

Eigenvalue
2
1 3.4612 0.9962 0.3461 0.3461
2 2.4650 1.1283 0.2465 0.5926
1.5
3 1.3367 0.5039 0.1337 0.7263
4 0.8329 0.1003 0.0833 0.8096 1
5 0.7325 0.3543 0.0733 0.8828
6 0.3783 0.0851 0.0378 0.9207 0.5

7 0.2932 0.0829 0.0293 0.9500

8 0.2103 0.0344 0.0210 0.9710 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Number of MFCC Coefficient
9 0.1759 0.0619 0.0176 0.9886
10 0.1140 0.0114 1.0000 Fig. 7. The Scree plot of infant cry
Total 10.0000 3.3472 1.0000 8.1877
Difference of Eigenvalue
1.4
TABLE 2 High Apgar Score
LOW APGAR SCORE (PREMATURE INFANT CRY) 1.2
Low Apgar Score

Coefficient Eigenvalue Difference Proportion Cumulative

1 2.5051 0.1905 0.2505 0.2505 1
2 2.3146 0.8052 0.2315 0.4820
3 1.5094 0.5539 0.1509 0.6329 0.8
Difference

4 0.9555 0.1130 0.0956 0.7285

0.6
5 0.8425 0.2129 0.0843 0.8127
6 0.6296 0.1117 0.0630 0.8757
0.4
7 0.5180 0.1984 0.0518 0.9275
8 0.3195 0.0760 0.0320 0.9594 0.2
9 0.2435 0.0813 0.0244 0.9838
10 0.1622 0.0162 1.0000 0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Total 10.0000 2.3429 1.0000 7.6529 Number of MFCC Coefficient

Fig. 8. The difference of eigenvalue

i. The eigenvalue – one criterion
Coefficients 1, 2 and 3 for high and low Apgar scores
(see Table 1 and Table 2) have eigenvalues greater than 1.
Based on one criterion method, these coefficients are
significant and should be retained.
ii. The Scree Test
The plot of eigenvalues against coefficient numbers for
high and low Apgar scores is shown in Figure 7. For both
cases, the eigenvalues decreases as the coefficient number
increases. This shows high frequency components of the
signals produce similarities in the coefficients.
Infant with high Apgar score has a relatively large
difference in eigenvalues between coefficient 1 and 6. From
iii. Cumulative Percent of Variance
The cumulative percent of total variance for high and low
Apgar scores are shown in Table 3 and 4 respectively. From
the Table 3, the cumulative percent of variance is equal to
some minimal value. For example, components 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
and 7 produce a proportion of total variance of 11.08%,
10.29%, 11.10%, 8.88%, 8.39%, 9.58% and 10.71%. Adding
these percentages together results in a cumulative percent of
variance of 70%. For low Apgar score, components 1 to 8 are
retained components since they produce a cumulative total
variance of 76.32%. Therefore, for high and low Apgar scores,
the coefficients 1 to 7 should be retained.

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 TABLE 3
ANALYSIS OF PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ON HIGH APGAR SCORE (NORMAL) INFANT CRY
Sample PC1 PC2 PC3 PC4 PC5 PC6 PC7 PC8 PC9 PC10
Bnormal_1 0.1394 -0.4756 0.3213 -0.1877 0.3991 -0.2369 0.0889 0.0714 0.5999 0.1660
Bnormal_2 -0.2450 0.4180 -0.4017 -0.0907 -0.2563 -0.0466 -0.1115 0.0306 0.6673 0.2629
Bnormal_3 0.4299 0.1146 -0.0442 0.2594 0.3146 0.4460 -0.6246 0.0082 0.1835 -0.1055
Bnormal_4 0.3009 0.2583 0.2335 0.6618 -0.0949 -0.0680 0.3974 0.3084 0.0809 0.2775
Bnormal_5 -0.2226 0.2909 -0.3128 0.0147 0.7747 0.1098 0.3866 0.0015 -0.0622 -0.0466
Cnormal_1 0.4509 0.2289 0.0076 -0.0881 -0.0044 -0.1641 0.1729 -0.8163 0.0234 0.1130
Cnormal_2 -0.0163 0.5017 0.3311 -0.1204 0.1818 -0.6283 -0.3410 0.1697 -0.0955 -0.2048
Cnormal_3 -0.4536 0.0150 0.3390 0.1485 0.1498 0.1138 -0.2846 -0.2566 -0.1837 0.6641
Cnormal_4 -0.3957 -0.1819 0.0136 0.5978 -0.0048 -0.1944 -0.0553 -0.3652 0.2361 -0.4719
Cnormal_5 0.1724 -0.3118 -0.5969 0.2220 0.1066 -0.5037 -0.2279 0.0667 -0.2271 0.3075
Explained Variance 0.1108 0.1029 0.1110 0.0888 0.0839 0.0958 0.1071 0.1043 0.0945 0.1008
Proportion of Tot Variance (%) 11.0826 10.2931 11.0978 8.8788 8.3861 9.5842 10.7125 10.4324 9.4500 10.0825
Cumulative of Tot Variance (%) 11.0826 21.3758 32.4735 41.3524 49.7385 59.3227 70.0352 80.4676 89.9175 100.0000

TABLE 4
ANALYSIS OF PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ON LOW APGAR SCORE (PREMATURE) INFANT CRY
Sample PC1 PC2 PC3 PC4 PC5 PC6 PC7 PC8 PC9 PC10
Prem2_1 0.0731 -0.5620 0.0651 -0.0915 0.3414 -0.2102 0.1643 -0.1039 0.5176 0.4469
Prem2_2 -0.1594 0.5633 0.1088 -0.1308 -0.2335 0.1500 -0.1557 0.0854 0.3219 0.6451
Prem2_3 0.3810 0.3532 -0.0826 0.1409 -0.2615 -0.3219 0.4834 -0.2904 0.3978 -0.2349
Prem2_4 0.4727 0.0318 -0.0855 0.0781 -0.0273 -0.5279 -0.6837 0.0150 -0.0705 0.1002
Prem2_5 -0.1893 -0.0155 -0.4893 0.6681 0.0958 0.2644 -0.2213 -0.3329 0.1911 0.0533
Prem3_1 -0.3147 0.3517 0.0810 0.1135 0.5259 -0.4578 0.1939 -0.2520 -0.3690 0.1856
Prem3_2 0.0498 0.0379 0.7329 0.0838 0.1122 0.2223 -0.2794 -0.4942 0.1474 -0.2140
Prem3_3 0.5206 -0.0080 -0.1831 -0.2201 0.0444 0.3762 0.1492 -0.4360 -0.4112 0.3493
Prem3_4 -0.3588 -0.0157 -0.3437 -0.6214 -0.1012 -0.1311 -0.2272 -0.4726 0.1401 -0.2112
Prem3_5 -0.2521 -0.3397 0.1871 0.2186 -0.6703 -0.2517 0.0951 -0.2556 -0.2867 0.2628
Explained Variance 0.1106 0.1094 0.1111 0.1105 0.1108 0.1024 0.1085 0.0396 0.1074 0.0899
Proportion of Tot Variance (%) 11.0559 10.9360 11.1110 11.0476 11.0774 10.2353 10.8535 3.9584 10.7395 8.9854
Cumulative of Tot Variance (%) 11.0559 21.9919 33.1030 44.1506 55.2280 65.4633 76.3168 80.2752 91.0146 100.0000

III. CONCLUSION REFERENCES

The analysis of cry signals with high and low Apgar
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