Effect of Noise on Generic Cough Models
Sayanton V. Dibbo1 * , Yugyeong Kim2 * , Sudip Vhaduri3
1
Dartmouth College, NH, USA, 2 Fordham University, NY, USA, and 3 Purdue University, IN, USA
1
f0048vh@dartmouth.edu,2 ykim180@fordham.edu,3 svhaduri@purdue.edu
Abstract—Respiratory diseases, such as chronic obstructive
pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma, are two major reasons
for people’s death across the globe. In addition to these common
inflammatory respiratory diseases, some human transmissible
respiratory diseases, such as coronaviruses, cause a global pan-
demic. One major symptom of these inflammatory respiratory
diseases is coughing. Identifying coughing using smartphone-
microphone recordings is easily doable from a remote setup and
can help physicians and researchers early guess a situation for an
individual and a community. However, smartphone-microphone
recordings can be affected by environmental noises and that can
impact the performance of models that are developed to detect
coughing from microphone recording. Thereby, in this work, we
present a detailed analysis of noise impacts on cough detection
models. We develop models using voluntary coughs and other
background sounds obtained from three public datasets and test
the performance of those models while detecting various types
of coughs, including COPD and COVID-19, obtain from three
separate datasets in the presence of background noises.
Index Terms—audio analytics; cough; noise; smartphone
I. I NTRODUCTION
A. Motivation
Coughing and its patterns have association with different
types of inflammatory respiratory disease, such as COPD [1],
asthma [2], tuberculosis [3], and coronavirus caused COVID-
19 or 2019-nCoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 diseases [4],
among several other [5]. According to the world health or-
ganization, about 67.7% of COVID-19 patients have a dry
cough [6]. Thereby, physicians rely on coughing and their
patterns as one of the major symptoms while diagnosing
various respiratory diseases and their stages. However, the
most common approaches to assess coughing patterns are
based on various patient-reported surveys [7], [8], which inher-
ently suffer from various limitations of self-reported surveys,
including human errors and recall bias [9]–[11]. Furthermore,
these self-reported cough symptoms do not correlate well with
objective cough recordings. Thereby, an objective reporting of
cough symptoms in different environments using audio sensing
and computing capability of smartphones can be extremely
helpful not only to better assess various respiratory disease
symptoms but also to foster wide-scale coverage at a low cost
in normal and human transmissible pandemic time.
B. Related Work
With the advancement of mobile networks due to emergence
of the internet of things (IoT) [12] and improvement of sensing
* Both authors contributed equally to this research
and computing capabilities of smartphones, we are able to ac-
complish various tasks, including sleep monitoring [13], [14],
mental and physical health monitoring [15]–[19], user authen-
tication [20]–[26], and place discovery [27]–[31], among many
others using various smartphone services. Motivated by this,
researchers have started relying on smartphone-microphone
data, i.e., audio recordings, to detect various types of non-
speech human sounds, including coughs [8] due to their low-
cost and wide-scale applicability. While some researchers have
developed machine learning models to detect coughs [32],
other researchers have started using deep learning to develop
cough detection models [33]. While most of their works rely
on server-based implementations to achieve a good perfor-
mance, they bring additional challenges, including offloading
privacy-sensitive audio recordings from the users’ end to
the server. Additionally, most of the works are targeted to
develop models to detect disease-specific cough using a limited
dataset with limited to no consideration of environmental
effects, e.g., the presence of different types of noises at
varying levels [34]. Additionally, models developed from one
disease-specific cough may down perform while applying on
a different disease-specific cough. Sometimes it is even more
challenging to develop cough models for an unknown or new
disease before its outbreak, such as COVID-19. Therefore, it
is important to develop cough models that can be applicable
to users with different types of respiratory diseases in the
presence of different background noises.
C. Contribution
In this work, we first present three modeling approaches
(Section II-A). Next, models developed from three publicly
available datasets are extensively tested on three separate
datasets, including two disease-specific coughs (COVID-19
and COPD) datasets (Section II-B) using 15 types of back-
ground noises at varying “signal-to-noise ratio” values to better
assess the generalizability and broad applicability of regular
cough-driven models (Section III). Findings from this work
will provide guidelines for future research in this direction.
II. M ETHODS
In this section, we introduce our modeling schemes. We also
introduce our datasets, pre-processing steps, feature generation
and selection, and hyper-parameter optimization.
A. Modeling Approaches
In this work, we present three modeling schemes. In un-
guided modeling approach, we develop unary (one class)

Fig. 1: Bar graphs with error bars of model performances when
testing on different types of coughs (no noise augmentation)
models using only target sound, e.g., cough. On the other
hand, in guided modeling approach, we develop three separate
binary models considering three categories (i.e., animal, non-
cough human, and non-living being) of background noises. In
these three models, class-1 consists of the same cough sounds,
but class-0 consists of one particular noise category, which is
comprised of five types of noises (Section II-B). Finally, In
semi-guided modeling approach, we develop binary models for
the semi-guided environments using coughs (class-1) and 15
types of sounds obtained from the three categories of sounds
(class-0).
B. Audio Data Collection
In this work, we collect various cough and non-cough
sounds from six separate audio datasets, including two respira-
tory disease datasets. The Environmental Sound Classification
(ESC-50) dataset [35] consists of five categories of sound clips
recorded at 44.1 kHz frequency. The FreeSound dataset [36]
is a collaborative repository with 400k+ sounds and effects,
which cover a wide range of recordings from field to syn-
thesized sounds, recorded at 44.6 ± 4.2 kHz frequency. The
Urban Sound 8K (US-8K) dataset [37] consists of 8k+ sound
clips recorded at 44.1 kHz from 10 types of urban sounds. In
addition to cough clips (obtain from ESC-50), from these three
datasets we create three common categories of background
sounds, which we use as class-0 (i.e., non-cough class) while
developing models and as background noises to modify test
coughs while testing noise effects.
Animal category consists of cricket, crow, dog, frog, and
rooster sounds obtain from the ESC-50 dataset. Non-cough
human category consists of breathing, laughing, snoring, and
sneezing sounds obtain from the ESC-50 dataset and the
throat-clearing sounds obtain from the FreeSound dataset.
Non-living being category consists of door knock, washing
machine, vacuum cleaner, and engine sounds obtain from the
ESC-50 dataset, and the air conditioner sounds obtain from
the US-8K dataset.
The SoundSnap (SNP) dataset [38] consists of 250k+ pro-
fessional sound effects. We obtain test-cough sounds recorded
at 46.65 ± 11.10 kHz. The Coswara COVID-19 dataset [39]
consists of cough and breathing sounds of COVID-19 positive
patients and healthy participants. We obtain the COVID-19
positive test-cough sounds recorded at 47.82 ± 0.83 kHz.
The chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) dataset
consists of cough sounds obtain from 12 patients (avg. age
56.2 ± 0.9 years). We use the RecForge II android app to
collect these test coughs at 44.1 kHz frequency. While we
primarily use the first three datasets for model development,
the last three datasets, i.e., SNP, COVID-19, and COPD
datasets, are used to test the models.
C. Pre-processing
We first change the sampling frequency of all clips to 44.1
kHz. Next, we segment the clips to collect ground truth labels,
augment the data, and split them into train-test sets.
1) Data Segmentation and Labeling: In this work, we use
the Audacity [40] desktop audio-processing application to
segment and label cough clips into two or three phase cough
events [7]. In summary, we obtain 106 (ESC-50), 106 (SNP),
170 (COVID-19), and 282 (COPD) cough events, and 40 non-
cough events from one of the 15 types of background sounds.
2) Data Augmentation: Often audio recordings, e.g., a
person’s coughing patterns, can be altered due to background
changes, a user’s physical state or mood (tired, excitement,
exercising, and other numerous states). To simulate these
effects, we consider three types of augmentations, i.e., 14 pitch
shifts (±0.5, ±1, ±1.5, ±2, ±2.5, ±3, and ±3.5), three time
stretches (0.5, 0.25, and 0.75), and four “signal-to-noise ratio”
(SNR) values (0.5, 0.1, 2, and 10) for noise superposition.
While pitch shift and time stretch are used to augment the
cough and non-cough sounds obtained from the ESC-50,
FreeSound, and US-8K datasets (during model development),
noise augmentations are used to modify test-coughs obtained
from the ESC-50, SNP, COVID-19, and COPD datasets.
3) Train-Test Splits: As discussed before, we primarily use
the 106 ESC-50 coughs and their 17 pitch-shift and time-
stretch augmentations, i.e., a total of 1098 cough events (106
x (1+17)) to form class-1, while developing models. We
first split the 106 coughs randomly 10 times using a 9:1
train-test ratio. Then, we combine the augmented versions to
maintain mutual exclusion between the train and test sets. For
class balancing, we also select the same number of train-test
samples uniformly from the five or 15 types of background
sounds (class-0 non-cough samples) to form the class-0 while
developing binary guided or semi-guided models, respectively.
D. Feature Engineering
We compute 40 Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC)s
as well as 40 first and 40 second temporal derivatives. In
summary, we compute a set of 120 candidate features. Using
the “Select K Best” and variance-based approaches, we find
120 and 70 most influential features are good compromise for
binary and unary classifiers, respectively.
E. Parameter Optimization and Classifier Selection
While modeling each split, we separately perform the hyper-
parameter optimization using grid search with various ranges
of values. Finally, we select a combination of various parame-
ter values that achieves the highest model performance across
all 10 splits as the optimal combination.
 Fig. 2: Bar graphs with error bars of model performances when testing on noise augmented coughs
From our experimentation with a wide range of classifiers,
we find the random forest (RF) with 100 estimators works
the best for the guided models trained with the non-cough
human and non-living being background sounds as class-0.
Similarly, gradient boosting (GB) with 100 estimators works
the best for guided models with animal background sounds as
class-0. For semi-guided models, random forest (RF) with 100
estimators works the best. The SVM classifier with polynomial
kernel (degree = 2 and regularization parameter = 1) works the
best for unary models, i.e., unguided models. All our analysis
presented in this manuscript (Section III) is based on these
optimal models and their optimal parameter values.
III. A NALYSIS
In this section, we compare the performance of three
modeling approaches (discussed in Section II-A), while de-
tecting coughs obtained from the three datasets, including two
respiratory disease-cough datasets in the presence or absence
of background noises. We primarily use accuracy (ACC) to
compare models while testing on different types of coughs.
We use “Binary GB 5 (Animal)”, “Binary RF 5 (Non-
cough)”, and “Binary RF 5 (Non-living)” to refer to the best
guided models developed for the three types of environments
(i.e., environments with the three categories of background
sounds; animal, non-cough human, and non-living being) using
binary classifiers with five types of sound from one of the three
categories of environments. Similarly, we use “Binary RF 15”
and “Unary” to indicate the best semi-guided and unguided
models developed using binary classifier with 15 types of
background sounds and unary classifier with no background
sounds, i.e., only cough sounds are used to develop models.
We first present our analysis using cough events without
noise augmentation. In Figure 1, we present a detailed anal-
ysis of different models (trained from ESC-50 coughs) when
testing on different types of coughs. In general, we observe
that the binary guided models trained with non-living being
background sounds as class-0 (i.e., “Binary RF 5 (Non-living)”
models) achieve an average accuracy of more than 0.9, which
is higher than the accuracy of other two guided models trained
with animal or non-cough human sounds as class-0. These two
(a) Performance degradation (b) T-SNE plot
Fig. 3: (a) Generic model performance, (b) cough distribution
guided models achieve lower than 0.75 accuracies when testing
on COVID-19 and COPD coughs.
In general, we observe that unguided models outperform the
semi-guided models, which is probably because the “unary”
unguided models are biased to class-1, i.e., cough sounds,
which is the only class that is used to train the models.
Similarly, in general, the best semi-guided model (i.e., “Binary
RF (15)”) performs worse than the best guided model, but
better than the unguided (exception COPD coughs).
Now, we present our analysis using noise-augmented cough
events to determine the robustness of our models in the
presence of noises. In Figure 2, we present performance of
different models while testing on three categories of back-
ground noises at four separate SNR values. In the figure, we
observe a performance drop with the addition of noise with
increased noise levels, i.e., lowered SNR values. Considering
all four SNR values, we find average test accuracy of more
than 0.8 for all noisy coughs, except COPD, for which the
average test accuracy is 0.72. As before, we observe that
guided models trained with the non-living being and non-
cough human sounds perform the best and worst, respectively.
At SNR value 0.1, the best model outperforms the worst model
by 24%.
To better understand the performance drop of different
cough models while testing on various types of coughs in
the absence or presence of noises at different SNR values,
we present the median test accuracy drop (%) in Figure 3a in
an aggregated form. In this analysis, we consider the median
accuracy values obtained while testing models on ESC-50
coughs using 9:1 train-test splits as our baseline performance.
In the figure, we observe that COPD coughs suffer from a
higher drop in accuracy compared to other coughs. With the
addition of noises, we observe a higher drop in accuracy
across all datasets, including the ESC-50 dataset. Additionally,
performance drop increases with the increase of noise values.
Next, in Figure 3b, we use the t-SNE plot to investigate data
distribution of coughs to determine the performance variation
across different types of coughs. In the figure, we observe that
cough samples obtained from SNP (red dots) are completely
mixed with the ESC-50 cough samples (yellow dots). Thereby,
models trained from ESC-50 coughs can well identify similar
test cough samples obtained from the SNP dataset. However,
cough samples obtained from the COVID-19 (blue dots) and
COPD (green dots) datasets form two visible clusters away
from the ESC-50 cough samples. Therefore, the ESC-50 cough
data-driven models struggle to identify the cough samples from
those two clusters. Since the COPD cluster is larger (i.e., more
samples) than the COVID-19 cluster, ESC-50 cough-driven
models perform worse when testing on COPD.
IV. D ISCUSSION AND F UTURE W ORK
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that
attempts to test three types of generic cough models when
detecting different types of coughs, including COVID-19 and
COPD in the presence or absence of 15 types of background
noises from smartphone-microphone audio recordings. While
models developed from the public ESC-50 dataset can achieve
a reasonable performance to detect different regular and res-
piratory coughs, such as COVID-19, disease-specific models
can improve the detection performance. However, this will
also require disease-specific data collection, which is relatively
easy for known diseases, such as COPD, but challenging for
cases like the sudden outbreak of a pandemic like COVID-19.
Thereby, the generic models can still be utilized for an initial
screening. Though this work is based on a limited number of
cough and non-cough events/samples, we apply three types
of augmentations to increase the data volume and create real-
world effects. Additionally, we perform 10 random 9:1 train-
test splits while developing and validating our models to avoid
overfitting and data sparsity. With the availability of large
datasets, more advanced modeling techniques, such as deep
learning models can be developed to improve performance.
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