Denoising of Electrocardiogram Signal using Multiband Filter and its Implementation on FPGA

Abstract

The electrocardiogram (ECG) signal carries vital information related to cardiac activities. While measuring  ECG using electrodes, the signal is contaminated with powerline interference (PLI) with its harmonics, baseline wandering (BW), motion artifact (MA) and high frequency noises. The extraction of ECG signal without loss of useful information from the noisy environment is required. Therefore, selection and implementation of efficient filter design is proposed. The FIR based multiband need of separate digital filters such as Lowpass, Highpass, Bandstop Filter in cascade. The coefficients of Finite Impulse Response (FIR) multiband filter are obtained using least squares based optimization method with realization in direct form symmetric structure. The performance of proposed filter is evaluated on a physionet ECG ID database having records of inherent noisy ECG signals. The performance is also verified by power spectrum analysis of noisy and filtered ECG waveform. Also, the feasibility of proposed multiband filter is investigated on Xilinx ISE and the design is implemented on field programmable gate array (FPGA) platform. Low order simple multiband filter structure is designed and implemented on the reconfigurable FPGA device.