2013 6rd International Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Informatics (BMEI 2013)

An Improved Empirical Mode DecompositionWavelet Algorithm for Phonocardiogram Signal

Denoising and its Application in the Frist and Second
Heart Sound Extraction
Hao Sun

Wei Chen*

City College
Kunming University of Science &
Technology
Kunming, 650051, China

AbstractIn this paper, an improved EMD-Wavelet algorithm

for PCG (Phonocardiogram) signal de-noising is proposed. Based
on PCG signal processing theory, the S1/S2 components can be
extracted by combining the improved EMD-Wavelet algorithm
and Shannon energy envelope algorithm. By applying the wavelet
transform algorithm and EMD (Empirical Mode Decomposition)
for pre-procession, the PCG signal is well filtered. Based on the
time frequency domain features of PCGs IMF components
which is extracted from the EMD algorithm and energy envelope
of the PCG, the S1/S2 components are pinpointed accurately.
Experiments of thirty samples illustrate the proposed algorithm,
which reveals that the accuracy for recognition of S1/S2
components is as high as 99.74%.
Keywords- EMD; Wavelet-Transform; Energy Envelope; PCG

I.

Department of Medical Instrument and

Food Engineering
Shanghai University of Science &
Technology
Shanghai, 200093, China

This paper proposes an improved EMD-Wavelet algorithm

for PCG signal de-noising. Based on PCG signal processing
theory, the S1/S2 components can be extracted by combining
the improved EMD-Wavelet algorithm and Shannon energy
envelope algorithm. By applying the wavelet transform
algorithm and EMD (Empirical Mode Decomposition) for preprocession, the PCG signal can be well filtered. Based on the
time frequency domain features of PCGs IMF components
which is extracted from the EMD algorithm and energy
envelope of the PCG, the S1/S2 components are pinpointed
accurately. Experiments of thirty samples illustrate the
proposed technique, which reveal that the accuracy for
recognition of S1/S2 components is as high as 99.74%. The
experimental results illustrate that the algorithm is feasibility
and provides basis for biometric identification.

INTRODUCTION

Heart sounds, which can be obtained by using a stethoscope

are the noises generated by the beating heart and the resultant
flow of blood through it (specifically, the turbulence created
when the heart valves snap shut)[2]. The normal heart sound
contains four components, which is S1, S2, S3 and S4, yet only
S1 and S2 components can be heard in general. S1 (the first
heart sound), signifying the beginning of ventricular systole, is
produced by the closure of atrioventricular valves. This sound
is made up of two internal components: the mitral component
(M1) corresponding to the closure of the mitral valve, and the
tricuspid component (T1) corresponds to the closing of the
tricuspid valve [11]. S2 (the second heart sound), marking the
beginning of ventricular diastole, is composed of two main
components: the aortic component (A2) associated with the
closure of the aortic valve, and the pulmonary component (P2),
associated with the closure of the pulmonary valve [6].
Generally, the frequency of heart sounds ranges from 0Hz to
600Hz.The frequency range of S1 is 50~150 Hz and S2 is
50~200 Hz. Whats more, a second peak can be found in the
frequency range of 250~350 Hz [4][7]. Due to the remarkable
frequency characteristics of S1 and S2, these two components
can be used as important parameters for identification.

978-1-4799-2761-6/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

Jing Gong

National Key Laboratory of

Biomedical sensor
Zhejiang University
Hangzhou, 310027, China

II.

FILTERING ALGORITHM

The PCG signal, acquired through phonocardio-transducer

usually contains a lot of noise. The hardware acquisition
system of PCG signal has been equipped with de-noising
function at present, but it cant dispose the noise completely.
Therefore, emphasis is placed on applying the digital signal
processing technology to PCG signal de-nosing. Owing to the
difference for each methods strength and weakness, wavelet
de-nosing approach has been used generally [1][3][9][10][15].
This paper describes an improved EMD-wavelet de-noising
method for the PCG signal processing.
A.

EMD Algorithm
EMD process, which is used to the nonlinear and unstable
signal, decomposes the signal into IMF (Intrinsic Mode
Functions) parameters [5]. The IMF parameters are made up of
components with frequency ranging for high frequency to low
frequency [10]. The definition of IMF (which is a dataset) is: (1)
the number of extreme (maximum and minimum points of
dataset) and the number of the zero crossing of function must

188

be equal or differ at most by one. (2)The mean value of the

envelopes defined by local extreme must be zero.
The EMD process for signal
following steps[12]:

s (t ) can be done in

smax (t ) , and
minimum smin (t ) of s (t ) . Connect all pointes smax (t ) with
(1)Find the location of all maximum

cubic spline (upper envelope) and do the same procedure

to smin (t ) when produce lower envelope.
(2)Compute the mean of spline curves at each point[13]:

smax (t ) smin (t )
.Remove the trend m(t ) .And let
2
h(t ) s (t ) m(t ) .

m(t )

h(t ) is an IMF, let ci (t ) h(t ) and increase i

by 1. Find the residual Ri s (t ) ci (t ) . If h1 is not an IMF
(3)If

(according to definition of IMF), further sifting is needed.

(4)Repeating steps 1 to 3 until Ri becomes monotonic
function and no more IMFs can be extracted.
(5)Now we have several IMF (IMFs represented by ci (t ) )
n

and the residual Rn , then

s (t ) cn (t ) Rn .

(2)Select suitable threshold for the detail coefficients in

each scale. Compute the wavelet coefficients with the threshold
quantization of decomposing coefficients.
(3)Reconstruct modified signal by using the coefficients
from the step2.
C. Improved EMD-Wavelet Filtering Algorithm
With the frequency characteristic of the PCG signal
decomposed by EMD algorithm, we select the particulars IMF
parameter and de-noise them with the wavelet de-noising
method. The de-noised PCG signal is reconstructed with
summation of the processed IMF parameters. The detail
procedure of EMD-Wavelet filtering algorithm is displayed as
follow (Figure3):
(1)Decompose original PCG signal with EMD algorithm
and get the IMF parameters of it.
(2)Compute the frequency spectrum of the IMF parameters
by using the FFT-transform algorithm.
(3)Find the high frequency component of the IMF
parameters. Reserve the high frequency IMF component
IMF2 ' and others IMF1 ' .
(4)De-noise the IMF2 ' by wavelet de-noising approach.
Reconstruct PCG signal with the de-noised

IMF2 ' components

and IMF1 ' .

i 1

To ensure the IMF parameters including certain physical

significance, this paper select the standard deviation as the end
criterion. The end criterion can be defined with the
formula:

SD

| R k 1 R k |2
.The value of the

R k21
i 1
n

parameter SD usually ranges from 0.2~0.3[16], and its 0.25 in

this paper.
B.

Wavelet De-noising Algorithm

The signal can be decomposed into several different
frequency bands and reserved the time domain characteristic by
applying the wavelet decomposition algorithm. With a model
of noisy random signal:

s (t ) f (t ) * e(t )
Here, s (t ) signifying the original noisy signal,
f (t ) signifying the real signal, e(t ) signifying the noisy, and
wavelet de-noising algorithm can be illustrated in following
steps:
(1)Select suitable wavelet function to decompose the
original signal to N layers and achieve the detail coefficient
and approximation coefficient of each scale. The high
frequency component, corresponding to the detail coefficients,
usually contains the noisy.

Figure 1. IMF parameter of each layer

189

Figure1 shows the IMF parameters of each layer. The

frequency spectrum of IMF parameters is displayed in the
Figure2. Db7 function is selected for the wavelet de-noising
algorithm in this paper through comparative experiments. The
decomposing level is five.Figure4 is the result of the improve
EMD-Wavelet algorithm for PCG signal.

Figure 4. The illustration of PCG signal denoising effect using EMDWavelet algorithm

III.

EXTRACTION OF S1/S2 COMPONENTS

A.

Normalize Shannon Energy

The process of normalized Shannon
signal s (t ) can be done in several steps:

energy

for

s (t )
signal
with
the
s (t )
equation: snorm
. max( s (t ) ) is equal to the
max( s (t ) )
maximum of the absolute value of s (t ) .
(1)Normalize

Figure 2. Frequency spectrum of each IMF parameter

the

(2)Compute average Shannon value of s (t ) with interval

20ms.Repeat 10ms signal for each count while computing the
average Shannon energy. The equation is as follow:

1 n 2
s (t ) log s 2 (t ) .Parameter n is equal to
n i 1
the length 20ms s (t ) .
ES (t )

(3)Compute

normalized

Shannon

ES (t ) mean( ES (t ))
energy Pe
. mean( ES (t )) is
std ( ES (t ))
equal to the average value of ES (t ) and the std ( ES (t )) is
equal to the standard deviation of ES (t ) .
B.

Location of S1/S2 in PCG

The amplitude of S1/S2 normalize Shannon energy is
higher than other positions. And S1 normalize Shannon energy
amplitude is higher than S2s.Therefore, the S1 and S2
components can be located accurately. The procedure of this
process is displaying as follow (Figure6):
Figure 3. Flow-process diagram of improved EMD-Wavelet algorithm

(1)Compute the cross-correlation coefficients between IMF

and original signal. Find the IMF parameter IMFi with
maximum of cross-correlation coefficient.

190

(2)Compute the normalized Shannon energy of IMFi and

de-noised PCG signal separately.
(3)Set thresholds for the energy envelopes in setp2
separately. Detect endpoint of S1/S2 component.
(4)Check the location of S1/S2 and extract S1/S2
component.
Threshold
in
the
detection
process
is Thr * max( ES (t )) .Hereinto, is corresponding to the
control coefficient and max( ES (t )) is signifying maximum
of the normalized Shannon energy. The value of is 5% in
this paper. The component, which is over Thr , is selected to 1
and the others are 0 in the above detection procedure. (Figure7)
The duration of S1 ranges from 70150ms and S2 ranges
from 60 120ms.Therefore, we seek endpoints in 100ms
duration around the S1/S2 peak. Due to the duration of
meaningful PCG component is usually above 30ms, we can
check the endpoints with follow criterion: if the duration
between two energy envelope waves is under 20ms, they can
be judged as the same component; if the duration is less than
30ms, they can be judged as the noisy.Figure8 is displaying the
location of S1/S2.
Figure 6.

Figure 7.

Procedure of detecting S1/S2

Detection of Shannon energy threshold

Figure 5. Shannon energy of PCG signal

IV.
TABLE I.

CROSS-CORRELATION COEFFICIENT BETWEEN IMF AND

ORIGINAL SIGNAL

IMF1
0.027945
IMF5
0.018173
IMF9
-0.000025

IMF2
0.38306
IMF6
0.00098
IMF10
-0.00020

IMF3
0.84678
IMF7
-0.00027
IMF11
-0.000012

IMF4
0.18707
IMF8
-0.00016
IMF12
0.00022

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The frequency band of S1 and S2 ranges from 50~200Hz,

while the noisy distributes in the high frequency IMF
components. For this reason, screening high frequency
components which are above 50Hz during the EMD-Wavelet
de-noising process is reasonable and important. The end
criterion in the EMD process is also important. Standard
deviation is usually selected as the limiter [14]. The value of it
ranges from 0.2~0.3, we select 0.25 in this paper.
Considering the cross-correlation coefficient between IMF
and original signal as the criterion when locating the S1 and S2
is aimed to find the main component in PCG signal and extract

191

S1/S2 component with the main component preliminarily. This

paper combines the preliminary estimation result with global
normalize Shannon energy envelope as the standard for
locating S1/S2 component.
Results of a thirty samples experimental illustrate the
proposed technique, which reveal that the accuracy for
recognition of S1/S2 components is as high as 99.74%. This
method set the basis for the further PCG identification.

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

Parameter

Figure 8. Location of S1/S2 components

[10]

TABLE II.

[11]

RESULT OF EXPERIMENT

Standard
Quantity

Detection
Quantity

Accuracy
Rate

S1 Component

202

202

100%

S2 Component

194

193

99.48%

Comprehe
nsive
Accuracy

[12]

99.74%

V.

CONCLUSION

The improved EMD-Wavelet algorithm for PCG signal

processing has some advantages over other algorithms. By
decomposing the signal to several different frequency bands
from high frequency to low frequency, high frequency can be
filtered pertinently and effectively. Extracting S1/S2
component by computing the Shannon energy envelope for
IMFi and de-noised PCG signal can avoid missing elements.
Results show this method extracts S1/S2 component accurately
and can be used further like PCG based biometrics
identification.

[13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This study is supported by the National Science Foundation
of Yunnan Province, China (No. 2009ZC051M) and General
Research Project of The Health Bureau of Zhejiang Province
(No.201340798).
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