Noise and baseline wandering suppression of ECG signals by morphological filter

Abstract

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals describe the electrical activity of the heart, and are universally by physicists in the diagnosis of cardiac pathologies. However, during the acquisition of ECGs they are often contaminated with different sources of noise, making interpretation difficult. Different techniques have been used to filter the ECG signal, in order to optimize the signal to noise ratio (S/N). In this paper, an approach based on morphological filtering is developed in order to filter the ECG. Morphological filtering is concerned with the detection of the ECG morphology, therefore allowing the suppression of noises and particularly baseline wandering. The implemented filter is evaluated using signals taken from the MIT-BIH ECG universal database. The results show that the performance of this filter is good compared with other filtering techniques.

Keywords:

• ECG
• Denoising
• Baseline correction
• Mathematical morphology
• Morphological filtering

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.