Mixed-transform based codec for 2D compression of ECG signals

Abstract: A method for ECG compression, by imaging the record as a 2D array and implementing a transform lossy compression strategy, is advanced. The particularity of the proposed transformation consists in applying a Discrete Wavelet Transform along one of the dimensions and the Discrete Cosine Transform along the other dimension. The performance of the method is demonstrated on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. Significant improvements upon the 1D version of the codec, and on benchmarks for 2D ECG compression, are achieved.