Electrocardiogram data compression using DCT based discrete orthogonal Stockwell transform

Abstract

This paper reports a novel electrocardiogram (ECG) data compression algorithm which employs DCT based discrete orthogonal Stockwell transform. Dead-zone quantization is utilized to apply quantization as well as a threshold condition to transform coefficients. Further, integer conversion of coefficients is performed. It improves compression at the cost of very less reconstruction error. All integer coefficients are encoded using run-length coding. It exploits the repetition of data instances. Run-length coding helps to achieve higher compression without any relevant information loss. Performance of the proposed compression algorithm is evaluated using 48 single channel ECG records which are taken from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. A competitive compression performance is observed in comparison with other ECG compression methods.