ECG baseline wander removal and impact on beat morphology: A comparative analysis

The aim of this study is to assess the impact of different baseline wander removal techniques on ECG signal morphology. We consider high-pass filtering, median filtering, adaptive filtering and wavelet adaptive filtering, which are common methods to baseline wander removal, and our recent approach based on quadratic variation reduction. The algorithms are compared both in terms of effectiveness in removing baseline wander and distortion introduced in beat morphology. Numerical results show that the approach based on quadratic variation reduction outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in estimating baseline wander, while preserving the morphology of all waveforms in ECG, both in normal and ectopic beats.