Investigation of Effective De Noising Techniques for ECG Signal

Due to fast life style Heart related problems are increasing day by day and it’s very important that disease related to heart can be diagnosed easily by simple medical techniques. These diseases can be diagnosed by ECG (Electrocardiogram) signals. ECG is used for measurement of electrical potentials with the help of contact electrodes, thus it is treated as one of the important signals. The ECG recording is often deteriorated by several factors such as power line interference and baseline wander noise. Various noises have to be removed for better clinical evaluation. This paper gives the different way in which noise occurs & methodologies to remove such addition in the ECG signal. Signal to noise ratio (SNR) is measured from ECG signal and comparison is made with the performance of different methods used for removal of ECG noise. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.160410

Statistical Properties and Applications of Empirical Mode Decomposition

Signal analysis is key to extracting information buried in noise. The decomposition of signal is a data analysis tool for determining the underlying physical components of a processed data set. However, conventional signal decomposition approaches such as wavelet analysis, Wagner-Ville, and various short-time Fourier spectrograms are inadequate to process real world signals. Moreover, most of the given techniques require \emph{a prior} knowledge of the processed signal, to select the proper decomposition basis, which makes them improper for a wide range of practical applications. Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is a non-parametric and adaptive basis driver that is capable of breaking-down non-linear, non-stationary signals into an intrinsic and finite components called Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF). In addition, EMD approximates a dyadic filter that isolates high frequency components, e.g. noise, in higher index IMFs. Despite of being widely used in different applications, EMD is an ad hoc solution. The adaptive performance of EMD comes at the expense of formulating a theoretical base. Therefore, numerical analysis is usually adopted in literature to interpret the behavior. This dissertation involves investigating statistical properties of EMD and utilizing the outcome to enhance the performance of signal de-noising and spectrum sensing systems. The novel contributions can be broadly summarized in three categories: a statistical analysis of the probability distributions of the IMFs and a suggestion of Generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD) as a best fit distribution; a de-noising scheme based on a null-hypothesis of IMFs utilizing the unique filter behavior of EMD; and a novel noise estimation approach that is used to shift semi-blind spectrum sensing techniques into fully-blind ones based on the first IMF. These contributions are justified statistically and analytically and include comparison with other state of art techniques

Performance Evaluation of Wavelet De-Noising Schemes for Suppression of Power Line Noise in Electrocardiogram Signals

Power line noise introduces distortions to recorded electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. These distortions compromise the integrity and negatively affect the interpretation of the ECG signals. Despite the fact that the amplifiers used in biomedical signal processing have high common mode rejection ratio (CMRR), ECG recordings are still often corrupted with residual Power Line Interference (PLI) noise. Further improvement in the hardware solutions do not have significant achievements in PLI noise suppression but rather introduce other adverse effects. Software approach is necessary to refine ECG data. Evaluation of PLI noise suppression in ECG signal in the wavelet domain is presented. The performance of the Hard Threshold Shrinkage Function (HTSF), the Soft Threshold Shrinkage Function (STSF), the Hyperbola Threshold Shrinkage Function (HYTSF), the Garrote Threshold Shrinkage Function (GTSF), and the Modified Garrote Threshold Shrinkage Function (MGTSF) for the suppression of PLI noise are evaluated and compared with the aid of an algorithm. The optimum tuning constant for the Modified Garrote Threshold Shrinkage Function (MGTSF) is found to be 1.18 for PLI noise. GTSF is found to have best performance closely followed by MGTSF in term of filtering Gain. HTSF recorded the lowest Gain. Filtering against PLI noise in the wavelet domain preserves the key features of the signal such as the QRS complex

Baseline adaptive wavelet thresholding technique for sEMG denoising

The surface Electromyography (sEMG) signal is affected by different sources of noises: current technology is considerably robust to the interferences of the power line or the cable motion artifacts, but still there are many limitations with the baseline and the movement artifact noise. In particular, these sources have frequency spectra that include also the low‐frequency components of the sEMG frequency spectrum; therefore, a standard all‐bandwidth filtering could alter important information. The Wavelet denoising method has been demonstrated to be a powerful solution in processing white Gaussian noise in biological signals. In this paper we introduce a new technique for the denoising of the sEMG signal: by using the baseline of the signal before the task, we estimate the thresholds to apply to the Wavelet thresholding procedure. The experiments have been performed on ten healthy subjects, by placing the electrodes on the Extensor Carpi Ulnaris and Triceps Brachii on right upper and lower arms, and performing a flexion and extension of the right wrist. An Inertial Measurement Unit, developed in our group, has been used to recognize the movements of the hands to segment the exercise and the pre‐task baseline. Finally, we show better performances of the proposed method in term of noise cancellation and distortion of the signal, quantified by a new suggested indicator of denoising quality, compared to the standard Donoho technique

Improved time-frequency de-noising of acoustic signals for underwater detection system

The capability to communicate and perform target localization efficiently in underwater environment is important in many applications. Sound waves are more suitable for underwater communication and target localization because attenuation in water is high for electromagnetic waves. Sound waves are subjected to underwater acoustic noise (UWAN), which is either man-made or natural. Optimum signal detection in UWAN can be achieved with the knowledge of noise statistics. The assumption of Additive White Gaussian noise (AWGN) allows the use of linear correlation (LC) detector. However, the non-Gaussian nature of UWAN results in the poor performance of such detector. This research presents an empirical model of the characteristics of UWAN in shallow waters. Data was measured in Tanjung Balau, Johor, Malaysia on 5 November 2013 and the analysis results showed that the UWAN has a non-Gaussian distribution with characteristics similar to 1/f noise. A complete detection system based on the noise models consisting of a broadband hydrophone, time-frequency distribution, de-noising method, and detection is proposed. In this research, S-transform and wavelet transform were used to generate the time-frequency representation before soft thresholding with modified universal threshold estimation was applied. A Gaussian noise injection detector (GNID) was used to overcome the problem of non-Gaussianity of the UWAN, and its performance was compared with other nonlinear detectors, such as locally optimal (LO) detector, sign correlation (SC) detector, and more conventionally matched filter (MF) detector. This system was evaluated on two types of signals, namely fixed-frequency and linear frequency modulated signals. For de-noising purposes, the S-transform outperformed the wavelet transform in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and root-mean-square error at 4 dB and 3 dB, respectively. The performance of the detectors was evaluated based on the energy-to-noise ratio (ENR) to achieve detection probability of 90% and a false alarm probability of 0.01. Thus, the ENR of the GNID using S-transform denoising, LO detector, SC detector, and MF detector were 8.89 dB, 10.66 dB, 12.7dB, and 12.5 dB, respectively, for the time-varying signal. Among the four detectors, the proposed GNID achieved the best performance, whereas the LC detector showed the weakest performance in the presence of UWAN