Near-lossless compression of ECG signals using perceptual masks in the DCT domain

Abstract

This paper describes a perceptual masking method to compress ECG signals. Perceptual mask definition demands a visual assessment of the resulting quality, instead of relying on purely mathematical distortion measures. The proposed method uses thresholding and numerical masks for DCT coefficients to obtain the maximum number of zeroed coefficients without perceptual distortions in the reconstructed signal. An average 52.42% zeroed coefficients was achieved for average PRD equal to 1.24. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.