ECG compression based on combining of EMD and wavelet transform

Abstract

A new electrocardiogram (ECG) compression method based on the combination of the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and the wavelet transform is presented. ECG signal can be decomposed into a set of intrinsic mode functions by the EMD. The proposed method recomposes the intrinsic mode functions into two groups, and compresses each group separately to fully utilise their data characteristics. The first group can be completely described by its extrema with negligible reconstruction error, while the second group is further decomposed by wavelet transform. With appropriate threshold selecting and the using of the run length coding and the Huffman coding, the proposed method exhibits competitive performances compared with other compressors for ECG compression.