Total Variation Electrocardiogram Filtering

We examine the performance of Total Variation (TV) smoothing for processing of noisy Electrocardiogram (ECG) recorded by an ambulatory device. The TV smoothing is compared with traditionally-used band-pass filtering using ECG with artificially added noise, as well as with real-world noise obtained during physiological monitoring. The fundamental difference between TV smoothing and traditional band-pass filtering is that TV smoothing allow preserving sharp slopes in the ECG, while traditional smoothing dampens them. Since the QRS complex represents a feature with steep slopes, the TV smoothing is a better choice ECG filtering. We found that TV smoothing outperforms traditional filtering on ECG signals recorded under different conditions and can be used as effective filtering tool in popular QRS detection algorithms.