Sleep snoring detection using multi-layer neural networks.

Snoring detection is important for diagnosing obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) and other respiratory sleep disorders. In general, audio signal processing such as snoring sound analysis uses the frequency characteristics of the signal. Recently, a correlational filter Multilayer Perceptron neural network (f-MLP) has been proposed, which has the first hidden layer of correlational filter operations in frequency domain. It demonstrated a superior classification performance for the pattern sets; of these, frequency information is the dominant feature for classification. The first hidden layer is implemented with the correlational filter operation; its output is the power spectrum of the filter output, while the other layers are the same as the ordinary multilayer Perceptron (o-MLP). By using the back-propagation learning algorithm for the correlational filter layer, f-MLP was able to self-adapt the filter coefficients to produce its output with more discrimination power for classification in the higher layer. In this research, this f-MLP was applied for sleep snoring signal detection. As a result, the f-MLP achieved an average detection rate of 96% for the test patterns, compared to the conventional multilayer neural network that demonstrates an 82% average detection rate.