Denoising of ECG signals using Non Local Means Filtering Technique

Abstract

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is an important biomedical signal for analyzing heart activity. Analysis of ECG becomes difficult if noise is augmented with the signal during acquisition. During recent years, several denoising techniques were analyzed within the field of signal processing. In this paper, non local means (NLM) filtering technique is explored for denoising the ECG signal. The noisy ECG signal is synthesized by adding pulse signals and is then denoised at different levels by optimizing various NLM parameters. The experimental results showed that the proposed technique successfully denoised the noisy ECG signals by selecting appropriate input NLM parameters. Finally, the signal to noise ratio (SNR) and mean square error (MSE) were also evaluated.