An Optimized Transform for ECG Signal Compression

Abstract-A significant feature of the coming digital era is the exponential increase in digital data, obtained from various signals specially the biomedical signals such as electrocardiogram (ECG), electroencephalogram (EEG), electromyogram (EMG) etc. How to transmit or store these signals efficiently becomes the most important issue. A digital compression technique is often used to solve this problem. This paper proposed a comparative study of transform based approach for ECG signal compression. Adaptive threshold is used on the transformed coefficients. The algorithm is tested for 10 different records from MIT-BIH arrhythmia database and obtained percentage root mean difference as around 0.528 to 0.584 % for compression ratio of 18.963:1 to 23.011:1 for DWT. Among DFT, DCT and DWT techniques, DWT has been proven to be very efficient for ECG signal coding. Further improvement in the CR is possible by efficient entropy coding