On-line cough recognizer system

Until now the intelligent, controlled, and automated use of acoustic bio-responses in cattle houses as indicators of animal condition has been limited to human perception. Although the appearance of coughing, sneezing, etc., may point to an environmental deficiency in the animal habitat or the presence of diseases amoung the cattle, in order to use this kind of acoustic information as a bio-response signal in practice it is necessary to develop a simple on-line algorithm. In this paper an on-line registration technique for pig coughing is presented. The application of a distance function to a spectral sound analysis allows us to distinguish coughing from other animal and environmental sounds like metal clanging, grunting, noise, etc. The sound database was collected on a group of six healthy animals.