An unsupervised segmentation of vocal breath sounds

Breathing is an essential part of human survival, which carries information about a person's physiological and psychological state. Generally, breath boundaries are marked by experts before using for any task. An unsupervised algorithm for breath boundary detection has been proposed for breath sounds recorded at the mouth also referred as vocal breath sounds (VBS) in this work. Breath sounds recorded at the mouth are used in this work because they are easy and contactless to record than tracheal breath sounds and lung breath sounds. The periodic nature of breath signal energy is used to segment the breath boundaries. Dynamic programming with the prior information of the number of breath phases($P$) and breath phase duration($d$) is used to find the boundaries. In this work, 367 breath boundaries from 60 subjects (31 healthy, 29 patients) having 307 breaths are predicted. With the proposed method, M ($89\%$), I ($13\%$), D ($11\%$) and S ($79\%$) is found. The proposed method shows better performance than the baselines used in this work. Even the classification performance between asthmatic and healthy subjects using estimated boundaries by the proposed method is comparable with the ground truth boundaries.