ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025

Exploring the Power of Empirical Mode Decomposition for Sensing the Sound of Silence: A Pilot Study on Mice Autism Detection via Ultrasonic Vocalisation

Chenhao Wu, Xiangjun Cai, Haojie Zhang, Tianrui Jia, Yilu Deng, Kun Qian, Björn W. Schuller, Yoshiharu Yamamoto, Jiang Liu

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder, and mice models have become essential for studying its genetic and behavioural aspects. Ultrasonic Vocalisations (USVs) emitted by mice provide a promising biomarker for ASD detection, but existing methods relying on spectrogram-based features struggle to capture the complex, non-stationary, and multi-scale nature of USVs. To address this, we propose a novel multi-branch fusion model that integrates spectrogram-based features with multi-scale features extracted using Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), which decomposes USVs into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) to represent their inherent complexity better. Through systematic occlusion experiments, we identify high-frequency components, particularly IMF1, as critical for accurate ASD detection, highlighting the diagnostic relevance of high-frequency USV patterns. Our model achieves an Unweighted Average Recall (UAR) of 0.75 in subject-level classification, significantly outperforming existing methods. These findings provide valuable insights into the importance of multi-scale feature extraction and offer a robust framework for improving ASD diagnostics and research.