R-peak Detection in Electrocardiogram Signals Using Continuous Wavelet Transform

Abstract

In this paper, an efficient wavelet-based method is proposed to detect the R-peak from QRS complex. At first, a preprocessing step is taken to remove high frequency noise of electrocardiogram (ECG) data. Then, continuous wavelet transform (CWT) is applied to the signal and the R-peaks of QRS complexes are detected with acceptable accuracy using special thresholding method. The detection performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated against the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. The numerical results indicated that the proposed method achieved a detection rate of 99.72% over all standard database used for evaluation. Also, evaluating the performance of the proposed algorithm on ECG signal with poor signal quality indicated the reliability of this algorithm even under the condition of poor SNR. Finally, the accuracy of detection rate is proven by comparing the proposed algorithm with some other methods from different literatures.

Keywords

• QRS complex
• R-peak detection
• Electrocardiogram
• Continuous wavelet transform
• Denoising