Pitch synchronous wavelet based fetal ECG extraction

Abstract

This paper proposes a new fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) extraction method using two pass pitch synchronous wavelet transform (PSWT). This representation is based on a modelling concept which is able to capture period to period fluctuations of the signal by means of basis elements that are comb-like in the frequency domain. The essence of the two pass approach involves first estimating the maternal ECG from a corrupted abdominal cutaneaous recording using a pitch synchronous decomposition. Based on this estimation, a second iteration is performed in order to recover the desired fetal ECG components. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated on a variety of ECG signals. Experimental results show the accuracy of the proposed technique especially in low fetal ECG power circumstance.