An improved method for 2-D ECG compression based on SPIHT algorithm

An improved wavelet based 2-D ECG compression method is presented which employs set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithm and run length (RL) coding. The proposed 2-D approach utilizes the fact that ECG signal shows redundancy between adjacent beats and also adjacent samples. The results of several experiments show that the wavelet function biorthogonal-6.8 with five level of decomposition has better performance compared to others. In period normalization repeating each beat instead of zero padding is more efficient. The initializing of list of insignificant pixels (LIP) is also done in a different way. Results of applying the proposed algorithm on several record of MIT/BIH database show lower percent root mean square difference (PRD) than other 1-D and several 2-D methods for the same compression ratio.