An Efficient ECG Denoising Technique Based on Non-local Means Estimation and Modified Empirical Mode Decomposition

TLDR: The experimental results presented in this paper show that the aforementioned shortcoming of the NLM method is addressed to a large extent and the proposed approach provides improved performance when compared to different state-of-the-art ECG denoising methods.

Abstract: Noninvasive nature of Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal makes it widely accepted for cardiac diagnosis. During the process of data acquisition, ECG signal is generally corrupted by a number of noises. Further, during ambulatory monitoring and wireless recording, ECG signal gets corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise. Without affecting the morphological structure, denoising of ECG signal is essential for proper diagnosis. This paper presents an ECG denoising method based on an effective combination of non-local means (NLM) estimation and empirical mode decomposition (EMD). Earlier works have shown that the patch-based NLM approach is insufficient for denoising the under-averaged region near high-amplitude QRS complex. To address this issue, the denoised signal obtained by NLM is decomposed into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using EMD in this work. Next, thresholding of the IMFs is done using the instantaneous half period criterion and the soft-thresholding to obtain the final denoised output. Furthermore, the modified empirical mode decomposition (M-EMD) is used in the place of standard EMD to reduce the computational cost. Performance of the proposed method is tested on a number of ECG signals from the MIT-BIH database. The experimental results presented in this paper show that the aforementioned shortcoming of the NLM method is addressed to a large extent. Moreover, the proposed approach provides improved performance when compared to different state-of-the-art ECG denoising methods.