Sharp transition FIR bandpass filter for processing bioelectric signals

Abstract

The main objective in a filter module is to improve the signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio, intelligently extract certain frequency components or separation of frequency bands among other applications. These much needed filters can help in areas of speech or biomedical signal processing. A sharp transition (ST) finite impulse response (FIR) band pass filter (BPF) is proposed for any filter order (N). The FIR filter is implemented with least passband ripple and a satisfactory stopband attenuation. The proposed filter design permits to set the fiduciary edges for any filter order. The merits of this proposed ST FIR filter includes its linearity, sharpness of the transition band and mitigating the effects of the Gibb’s phenomenon at the fiduciary edges. The accuracy and failed detections were computed to evaluate the performance of the ST FIR BPF design using the Physionet database. It is observed that the designed ST FIR BPF was able to compute precise single fetus R-peaks and maternal R-peaks. The proposed ST filter can also be used for other ranged frequency signals other than biomedical electrical signals.