Power line interference cancellation in ECG signals using Alpha-Beta filter

Electrocardiograph (ECG) signal provides a quick and easy interpretation of Heart-related diseases. But the presence of artifacts can pose a problem in its diagnosis and also leads to its degradation. Power Line Interference (PLI) is one of the artifacts which can deteriorate its quality. To deal with this noise and to nullify its effect, Alpha-Beta filter is proposed and addressed in this paper. The filter performs the estimation on the n-th observation and also smoothes it to reduce the noise level. The performance measures of the filter i.e. tracking accuracy and noise suppression hinge on its weighting factors i.e. α & β. The experiment is performed on different ECG records, taken from the benchmark MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. The results indicate the Alpha-Beta filter has estimated the ECG signals appropriately and also suppressed the noise to an acceptable level.