An error-bounded median filter for correcting ECG baseline wander

The baseline wander (BLW) in electrocardiogram (ECG) is a common disturbance that has a significant influence on the ECG wave pattern recognition. Many methods, such as IIR filter, mean filter, etc., can be used to correct BLW; However, most of them work on the original ECG signals. Compressed ECG data are economic for data storage and transmission, and if the baseline correction can be processed on them, it will be more efficient than we decompress them first and then do such correction. In this paper, we propose a new type of median filter CM_Filter, which works on the synopses of straight lines achieved from ECG by piecewise linear approximation (PLA) under maximum error bound. In CM_Filter, a heuristic strategy “Quick-Finding” is deduced by a property of straight lines in order to get the quality-assured median values from the synopses. The extended experimental tests demonstrate that the proposed filter is very efficient in execution time, and effective for correcting both slow and abrupt ECG baseline wander.