An Efficient Lossless ECG Compression Method Using Delta Coding and Optimal Selective Huffman Coding

In this study, we develop an efficient lossless ECG compression based on delta coding and optimal selective Huffman coding and implement the proposed algorithm in the S3C2440 development board. The delta coding is applied to reduce the dynamic range of the original ECG signals. The optimal selective Huffman coding is used to enhance the computation efficiency of canonical Huffman coding. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, a 10-min ECG recordings (MIT100) which is a normal sinus rhythm taken from the MIT/BIH database were applied to the coding experiments. Comparing with the canonical Huffman coding algorithm, the proposed algorithm has gained much improvement on the computation efficiency by 211.2% when the first 63 frequently occurring codewords are selected, although slightly sacrificing the compression rate by 0.34%.