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Automatic infant cry classification is one of the crucial studies under biomedical engineering scope, adopting the medical and engineering techniques for the classification of diverse physical and physiological conditions of the infants by their cry signal. Subsequently, plentiful studies have executed and issued, broadened the potential application of cry analyses. As yet, there is no ultimate literature documentation composed by performing a longitudinal study, emphasizing on the boast trend of automatic classification of infant cry. A review of literature is performed using the key words “infant cry” AND “automatic classification” from different online resources, regardless of the year of published in order to produce a comprehensive review. Review papers were excluded. Results of search reported about more than 300 papers and after some exclusion 101 papers were selected. This review endeavors at reporting an overview about recent advances and developments in the field of automated infant cry classification, specifically focusing on the developed infant cry databases and approaches involved in signal processing and recognition phases. Eventually, this article was accomplished with some possible implications which may lead for development of an advanced automated cry based classification systems for real time applications.

Wavelet theory is emerging as one of the prevalent tool in signal and image processing applications. However, the most suitable mother wavelet for these applications is still a relative question mark amongst researchers. Selection of best mother wavelet through parameterization leads to better findings for the analysis in comparison to random selection. The objective of this article is to compare the performance of the existing members of mother wavelets and to select the most suitable mother wavelet for accurate infant cry classification. Optimal wavelet is found using three different criteria namely the degree of similarity of mother wavelets, regularity of mother wavelets and accuracy of correct recognition during classification processes. Recorded normal and pathological infant cry signals are decomposed into five levels using wavelet packet transform. Energy and entropy features are extracted at different sub bands of cry signals and their effectiveness are tested with four supervised neural network architectures. Findings of this study expound that, the Finite impulse response based approximation of Meyer is the best wavelet candidate for accurate infant cry classification analysis.