Abstract
Cough is an important symptom of numerous respiratory diseases,
including COVID-19. While different cough phases (i.e., inhalation,
compression, and expulsion) have been shown to be related to different
pathological origins, existing cough-based COVID-19 detection systems
rely on the entire cough recording, thus such phase-related
characteristics are overlooked. In this study, our aim is two-fold.
First, we have annotated over 1,250 cough recordings from two
publicly-available cough sound databases, thus providing the research
community with fine-grained cough phase labels. Next, we extract a
number of temporal and acoustic features from each cough phase and test
their usefulness and complementarity for COVID-19 detection. Experiments
show the importance of cough phase segmentation, not only for improved
COVID-19 detection, but also for the development of models that are
interpretable and can better generalize across datasets.