An effective ECG signal compression algorithm with self controlled reconstruction quality

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are frequently used in the continuous monitoring of heart patients. These recordings generate huge data, which is difficult to store or transmit in telehealth applications. In the above context, this work proposes an efficient novel compression algorithm by integrating the tunable-Q wavelet transform (TQWT) with coronavirus herd immunity optimizer (CHIO). Additionally, this algorithm facilitates the self-adaptive nature to regulate the reconstruction quality by limiting the error parameter. CHIO is a human perception-based algorithm, used to select optimum TQWT parameters, where decomposition level of TQWT is optimized for the first time in the field of ECG compression. The obtained transform coefficients are then thresholded, quantized, and encoded to improve the compression further. The proposed work is tested on MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. The compression and optimization performance using CHIO is also compared with well-established optimization algorithms. The compression performance is measured in terms of compression ratio, signal-to-noise ratio, percent root mean square difference, quality score, and correlation coefficient.