Abstract:
The electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) is a recording of the potential produced by the heart, taken from specific predetermined parts of the body such as arms, legs or points on the chest. It plays an important role in medical field as monitoring of human body and the diagnosis of many heart related problems depend on the recording. Hence its accurate measurement is a must.
This paper presents the study of filtering the noises present in an EKG waveform using 2-D wavelet techniques. Wavelets are mathematical functions that cut up data into different frequency components, and then study each component with a resolution matched to its scale. Wavelets are predominantly used for image processing techniques. Hence to use a 2-D technique over a 1-D signal, an EKG should be represented as a mesh or a 2-D image map. Such an image map, or an EKG map in this case, can be used by wavelet processing for de-noising purposes. The de-noising procedure is performed using three steps: decomposition, thresholding and reconstruction. The paper discusses the mentioned steps in detail.
