Automatic COVID-19 Detection from Cough Sounds Using Multi-Headed Convolutional Neural Networks

Novel coronavirus disease 2019 (Corona Virus Disease 2019, COVID-19) is rampant all over the world, threatening human life and health. Currently, the detection of the presence of nucleic acid from SARS-CoV-2 is mainly based on the nucleic acid test as the standard. However, this method not only takes up a lot of medical resources but also takes a long time to achieve detection results. According to medical analysis, the surface protein of the novel coronavirus can invade the respiratory epithelial cells of patients and cause severe inflammation of the respiratory system, making the cough of COVID-19 patients different from that of healthy people. In this study, the cough sound is used as a large-scale pre-screening method before the nucleic acid test. Firstly, the Mel spectrum features, Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, and VGG embeddings features of cough sound are extracted and oversampling technology is used to balance the dataset for classes with a small number of samples. In terms of the model, we designed multi-headed convolutional neural networks to predict audio samples, and adopted an early stop method to avoid the over-fitting problem of the model. The performance of the model is measured by the binary cross-entropy loss function. Our model performs well on the dataset of the AICovidVN 115M challenge that its accuracy rate is 98.1%, and on the dataset of the University of Cambridge that its accuracy rate is 91.36%.