Classification of Infant Sleep-Wake States from Natural Overnight In-Crib Sleep Videos

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Shayda Moezzi, Michael Wan, Sai Kumar Reddy Manne, Amal Mathew, Shaotong Zhu, Bishoy Galoaa, Elaheh Hatamimajoumerd, Emma C. Grace, Cassandra B. Rowan, Emily Zimmerman, Briana J. Taylor, Marie J. Hayes, Sarah Ostadabbas

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 12 Nov 2025WACV (Workshops) 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Infant sleep is critical for healthy development, and disruptions in sleep patterns can have profound implications for infant brain maturation and overall well-being. Traditional methods for monitoring infant sleep often rely on intrusive equipment or time-intensive manual annotations, which hinder their scalability in clinical and research applications. We present our dataset, SmallSleeps, which includes 152 hours of overnight recordings of 17 infants aged 4–11 months captured in real-world home environments. Using this dataset, we train a deep learning algorithm for classification of infant sleep-wake states from short 90 s video clips drawn from natural, overnight, in-crib baby monitor footage, based on a two-stream spatiotemporal model which integrates rich RGB frames with optical flow features. Our binary classification algorithm was trained and tested on “pure” state clips featuring a single state dominating the timeline (i.e., over 90% sleep or over 90% wake) and achieves over 80% precision and recall. We also perform a careful experimental study of the result of training and testing on “mixed” clips featuring specified levels of heterogeneity, with a view towards applications to infant sleep segmentation and sleep quality classification in longer, overnight videos, where local behavior is often mixed. This local-to-global approach allows for deep learning to be effectively deployed on the strength of tens of thou-sands of video clips, despite a relatively modest sample size of 17 infants11Our code can be found at https://github.com/ostadabbas/Infant-Sleep-vs-Awake-Detection. Sup-ported by NSF-CAREER Grant #2143882, a Northeastern University-University of Maine Seed Grant, and a Northeastern University TIER 1 Seed Grant..