Comparative study of ECG signal denoising by wavelet thresholding in empirical and variational mode decomposition domains

Hybrid denoising models based on combining empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) were found to be effective in removing additive Gaussian noise from electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. Recently, variational mode decomposition (VMD) has been proposed as a multiresolution technique that overcomes some of the limits of the EMD. Two ECG denoising approaches are compared. The first is based on denoising in the EMD domain by DWT thresholding, whereas the second is based on noise reduction in the VMD domain by DWT thresholding. Using signal-to-noise ratio and mean of squared errors as performance measures, simulation results show that the VMD-DWT approach outperforms the conventional EMD-DWT. In addition, a non-local means approach used as a reference technique provides better results than the VMD-DWT approach.