An efficient method of ECG signal compression by using a DCT-IV spectrum

In this paper, we propose an efficient electrocardiogram (ECG) compression algorithm with the advantages of high-accuracy and high-compressing-ratio. The ECG signal sources are employed by the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database with a sampling rate of 360 Hz, and then we transform these ECG signals from time domain into frequency domain by using 64-point the type IV of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT-IV), which is difference to the traditional DCT-II method. In addition, a differential value coding and a Huffman coding are both employed in the proposed algorithm. Compared with Lee et al.´s algorithm, the simulation results clearly show that the proposed method has a greater performance in terms of Compressing Ratio (CR), Percent Root-mean-square Difference (PRD), Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), and Quality Score (QS). Especially, the QS value of the proposed algorithm has an outstanding improvement by increasing 23.8%.