This paper introduces a new effective coding technique for the compression of Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals using the wavelet transform. It is based on generating a binary stream of 1's and 0's that encodes the structure of wavelet coefficients. This binary stream is compressed using a modified run length encoding. The effects of signal length, finite word length representation of the wavelet coefficients and threshold levels selection on the quality of the reconstructed signal that is measured on PRD and compression ratio measures are investigated. The technique is tested for the compression of normal and abnormal ECG signals extracted from MIT-BIH database. The performance parameters of the proposed coding algorithm are measured and a compression ratio of 23.5:1 with a PRD of 1.53% is achieved.
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