Major: Signal Processing

Crying is the first means of communication for an infant through which it ex-presses its physiological and psychological needs. Infant cry analysis is the inves-tigation of infant cry vocalizations in order to extract social and communicative information about infant behavior, and diagnostic information about infant health. This thesis is part of a larger study whose objective is to analyze the acoustic proper-ties of infant cry signals and use it for early assessment of neurological developmental issues in infants. This thesis deals with two research problems in the context of infant cry signals: audio segmentation of cry recordings in order to extract relevant acoustic parts, and fundamental frequency (F0) estimation of the extracted acoustic regions. The extracted acoustic regions are relevant for extracting parameters useful for drawing correlation with developmental outcomes of the infants. Fundamental frequency (F0) , is one such potentially useful parameter whose variation has been found to correlate with cases of neurological insults in infants. The cry recordings are cap-tured in realistic hospital environments under varied contexts like infant crying out o