Automatic and unsupervised snore sound extraction from respiratory sound signals

In this paper, an automatic and unsupervised snore detection algorithm is proposed. The respiratory sound signals of 30 patients with different levels of airway obstruction were recorded by two microphones: one placed over the trachea (the tracheal microphone), and the other was a freestanding microphone (the ambient microphone). All the recordings were done simultaneously with full-night polysomnography during sleep. The sound activity episodes were identified using the vertical box (V-Box) algorithm. The 500-Hz subband energy distribution and principal component analysis were used to extract discriminative features from sound episodes. An unsupervised fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm was then deployed to label the sound episodes as either snore or no-snore class, which could be breath sound, swallowing sound, or any other noise. The algorithm was evaluated using manual annotation of the sound signals. The overall accuracy of the proposed algorithm was found to be 98.6% for tracheal sounds recordings, and 93.1% for the sounds recorded by the ambient microphone.