Six-band sub-band coder on ECG waveforms

An ECG sampled at a rate of 500 samples s^-1 or more produces a large amount of redundant data that are difficult to store and transmit. A process is therefore required to represent the signals with clinically acceptable fidelity and with the least code bits possible. In the paper, an efficient sub-band coding method for encoding ECG waveforms is presented. Although sub-band coding has been successfully applied to speech signals, it is the first time that this technique has been applied to the encoding of ECG waveforms. A frequency band decomposition of an ECG waveform is carried out by means of quadrature mirror filters (QMF), which split the ECG spectrum into six bands of unequal width. In the lower frequency bands, which contain most of the ECG spectrum energy, a larger number of bits per sample is used, whereas in upper frequency bands, which contain noise-like signals, fewer bits per sample and the run length coding method are used. The simulation results are presented in terms of bit rates and the quality of the reconstructed waveforms. The results show that a reproduction with an average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 29·97 dB can be achieved even at an average bit rate of 0·81 bits per sample.