ECG Signal Compression using efficient transformations

ECG is a standard tool to monitor heart function. ECG generated waveforms are used to find patterns of irregularities in cardiac cycles in patients. In many cases, irregularities evolve over an extended period of time that requires continuous monitoring. However, this requires compression of ECG signals. In the past decades, many compression methods have been proposed. In this paper a comparative analysis of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), discrete sine Transform (DST), and Discrete cosine Transform (DCT) based approach is carried out with good compression ratio and less computation time. To generalize transform based techniques, Tachycardia data base recording which have larger information content are compressed .The appropriate use of a block based DCT associated to a uniform scalar dead zone quantiser and arithmetic coding show very good results, confirming that the proposed strategy exhibits competitive performances compared with the most popular compressors used for ECG compression.