Filtering of surface EMG using ensemble empirical mode decomposition

Surface electromyogram (EMG) is often corrupted by three types of noises, i.e. power line interference (PLI), white Gaussian noise (WGN), and baseline wandering (BW). A novel framework based primarily on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) was developed to reduce all the three noise contaminations from surface EMG. In addition to regular EMD, the ensemble EMD (EEMD) was also examined for surface EMG denoising. The advantages of the EMD based methods were demonstrated by comparing them with the traditional digital filters, using signals derived from our routine electrode array surface EMG recordings. The experimental results demonstrated that the EMD based methods achieved better performance than the conventional digital filters, especially when the signal to noise ratio of the processed signal was low. Among all the examined methods, the EEMD based approach achieved the best surface EMG denoising performance.