Fast and Effective Baseline Wander Estimation and Removal

Baseline wander removal is an unavoidable prepro- cessing step in ECG signal processing. The in-band nature of baseline wander makes its removal difficult without affecting ECG, in particular the ST segment. This is a portion of the ECG with high clinical relevance, as it is related to the diagnosis of acute coronary syndromes. We have recently proposed a novel baseline removal algorithm based on the notion of quadratic variation reduction. In this paper, we shortly recall the rationale behind our approach and report main results of performance analysis of our algorithm versus state-of-the-art approaches. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the approach and highlight its ability to remove baseline wander while preserving the ST segment. The algorithm compares favorably also in terms of computational complexity, which is linear in the size of the vector to detrend. Eventually, it is worthwhile noting that its application is not limited to ECG, but can be effectively applied to a broader class of signals, such as EEG or EMG.