ECG data compression using wavelets

Electrocardiograms (ECG) are widely used in various medical or health care organizations to record the electrical activity of the heart. This thesis aims at digitizing and compressing ECG waveform in the hard copy using an image processing technique and wavelet transforms. The coding is done in MATLAB. The digital values of the waveform are obtained by applying the image processing technique called 'Color Slicing'. 9-7 linear phase bi-orthogonal wavelets are used in the wavelet transform to obtain the subband coefficients. The EZW encoding compresses the coefficients by analyzing the relationship between the coefficients in different subbands. The reconstructed waveform is quantitatively assesses for the quality of compression using the compression ratio (CR) and mean square error (MSE). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...