LAUSR

Snore sound (SnS) classification can support a targeted surgical approach to sleep related breathing disorders. Using machine listening methods, we aim to find the location of obstruction and vibration within a subject’s upper airway. Wavelet features have been demonstrated to be efficient in the recognition of SnSs in previous studies. In this work, we use a bag-of-audio-words approach to enhance the low-level wavelet features extracted from SnS data. A Naïve Bayes model was selected as the classifier based on its superiority in initial experiments. We use SnS data collected from 219 independent subjects under drug-induced sleep endoscopy performed at three medical centres. The unweighted average recall achieved by our proposed method is 69.4%, which significantly ($$p<0.005,$$p<0.005, one-tailed z-test) outperforms the official baseline (58.5%), and beats the winner (64.2%) of the INTERSPEECH ComParE Challenge 2017 Snoring sub-challenge. In addition, the conventionally used features like formants, mel-scale frequency cepstral coefficients, subband energy ratios, spectral frequency features, and the features extracted by the openSMILE toolkit are compared with our proposed feature set. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in SnS classification.