Implementation of effective hybrid window function for E.C.G signal denoising

Abstract

The primary objective of this research paper, is to introduce an effective hybrid window function for low pass finite impulse response (FIR) filter design which is useful for denoising the electrocardiogram (ECG) signals corrupted by additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) even at low signal to noise ratio (SNR) condition. The noise may be introduced during ambulatory patient monitoring in wireless ECG recording environment. For proper diagnosis, it is very essential to receive noiseless signal even at very low SNR. To reach this objective, a hybrid window function is proposed and a linear phase FIR low pass filter is designed by using the proposed windowing technique. The proposed hybrid window is a product of Blackman and flattop window functions with modified window coefficients. Stopband attenuation of the filter constructed using proposed hybrid window is very high with respect to other traditional window functions and different hybrid window functions created by different combinations of some well-known traditional windows. Filter designed with the proposed hybrid window function have comparable transition bandwidth with respect to other hybrid window functions. ECG denoising performance of the proposed filter is better with respect to others in low SNR environment.