Neural recognition system for swine cough

Coughing is one of the most frequent presenting symptoms of many diseases a ffecting the airways and the lungs of humans and animals. The aim of this p aper is to build up an intelligent alarm system that can be used for the ea rly detection of cough sounds in piggeries. Registration of coughs from dif ferent pigs in a metallic chamber was done in order to analyse the acoustic al signal. A new approach is presented to distinguish cough sounds from oth er sounds Like grunts, metal clanging and noise using neural networks (NN) as classification method. Other signals (grunts, metal clanging, etc.) coul d also be detected. Self-organising maps are used for visualisation of data relationships. Several types of NN are compared with statistical methods f or the classification of the cough sounds. The early detection of coughs ca n be used for the construction of an intelligent alarm that can inform abou t the presence of a possible viral infection. (C) 2001 IMACS. Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.