Variational mode decomposition based ECG denoising using non-local means and wavelet domain filtering

This paper presents a novel electrocardiogram (ECG) denoising approach based on variational mode decomposition (VMD). This work also incorporates the efficacy of the non-local means (NLM) estimation and the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) filtering technique. Current ECG denoising methods fail to remove noise from the entire frequency range of the ECG signal. To achieve the effective ECG denoising goal, the noisy ECG signal is decomposed into narrow-band variational mode functions (VMFs) using VMD method. The idea is to filter out noise from these narrow-band VMFs. To achieve that, the center frequency information associated with each VMFs is used to exclusively divide them into lower- and higher-frequency signal groups. The higher frequency VMFs were filtered out using DWT-thresholding technique. The lower frequency VMFs are denoised through NLM estimation technique. The non-recursive nature of VMD enables the parallel processing of NLM estimation and DWT filtering. The traditional DWT-based approaches need large decomposition levels to filter low frequency noises and at the same time NLM technique suffers from the rare-patch effect in high-frequency region. On the contrary, in the proposed framework both NLM and DWT approaches complement each other to overcome their individual ill-effects. The signal reconstruction is performed using the denoised high frequency and low frequency VMFs. The simulation performed on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database shows that the proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art ECG denoising techniques.