Efficient snoring and breathing detection based on sub-band spectral statistics

Snoring, a common symptom in the general population may indicate the presence of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). In order to detect snoring events in sleep sound recordings, a novel method was proposed in this paper. The proposed method operates by analyzing the acoustic characteristics of the snoring sounds. Based on these acoustic properties, the feature vectors are obtained using the mean and standard deviation of the sub-band spectral energy. A support vector machine is then applied to perform the frame-based classification procedure. This method was demonstrated experimentally to be effective for snoring detection. The database for detection included full-night audio recordings from four individuals who acknowledged having snoring habits. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated by classifying different events (snoring, breathing and silence) from the sleep sound recordings and comparing the classification against ground truth. The proposed algorithm was able to achieve an accuracy of 99.61% for detecting snoring events, 99.16% for breathing, and 99.55% for silence.