A Survey on Fetal ECG Denoising and QRS Peak Detection

ECG (electrocardiogram) is a test that measures the electrical activity of the heart. Mostly, the ECG is contaminated by noise and artifacts that can be within the band of interest (0.05-100 Hz) during their recording. In this paper a few signal processing techniques for fetal ECG analysis are discussed. The most important applications of wavelets is the removal of noise from signals called denoising, Wavelet coefficient thresholding is used to separate signal from noise. Denoising of the ECG wave based upon the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and discrete stationary wavelet transform (SWT) with different threshold techniques are studied. These denoised signals can be used for the accurate determination of fetal heart rate (FHR) and further diagnostic applications pertaining to fetus. Empirical mode Decomposition can be used to detect R peak.