An efficient ECG Denoising method using Discrete Wavelet with Savitzky-Golay filter

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a widely used tool for the early diagnosis and evaluation of cardiac disorders. The ECG signal is usually distorted during recording by different types of noise which may lead to incorrect diagnosis. Therefore, clear ECG signals are required to support good cardiac disorder diagnosing. In this paper, an efficient ECG denoising method using combined discrete wavelet with Savitzky-Golay (S-G) filter is proposed. The performance of S-G filter is studied in terms of polynomial degree and frame size, i.e. signal section. In addition, the performance of denoising wavelet is studied in term of mother wavelet type and wavelet order. The advantage of S-G filter is combined with discrete wavelet denoising method to get better denoising performance. The performance of denoising ECG are evaluated using signal to noise ratio (SNR) and percentage root mean square difference (PRD). For this we used simulated and gaussian white noise surrogated ECG signals. Our results show that combined S-G and wavelet filter denoising is noticeable better than the respective individual procedures. In addition, we found that the selection of frame size, order of the S-G filter and the wavelet type and order should be done carefully in order to get optimal results. It also holds true for the new filter that the optimal choice of filter parameters is a compromise between noise reduction and distortion.