Journal Article
An Open-Source Dataset for Infant Cry and Snoring Detection
Journal of the Audio Engineering Society · Volume 74 · Issue 3 · pp. 164–177 · March 2026
Abstract
The detection of infant cry and snoring events plays an important role in health monitoring and audio signal analysis. However, existing sound event detection datasets rarely provide sufficient, strongly labeled data for these specific sounds. This paper introduces the Infant Cry and Snoring Detection (ICSD) dataset, a novel open-source resource designed to advance research in this area. The ICSD comprises three subsets: a real strongly labeled set with manually annotated event boundaries, a weakly labeled set with clip-level annotations, and a synthetic set generated using the Scaper Toolkit with strong event-based labels. Furthermore, three baseline systems are established on the ICSD dataset, all built upon a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) backbone: a mean-teacher CRNN system, a CRNN+bidirectional encoder representation from audio transformers (BEATs) system integrating pretrained BEATs audio representations, and a Competitive CRNN+BEATs system, which extends the previous model by incorporating speech, music, and noise categories to mitigate acoustic confusion. Experimental results show that the BEATs-based systems outperform the mean-teacher CRNN baseline, and the Competitive CRNN+BEATs model achieves superior robustness on real recordings with reduced false-positive rates. The ICSD dataset and proposed baselines are expected to serve as valuable open benchmarks for future infant cry and snoring detection research.
