An Efficient Lossless ECG Compression Method Using
Delta Coding and Optimal Selective Huffman Coding
G.C. Chang1 and Y.D. Lin2
1
Department of Information Engineering, I-Shou University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, ROC
2
Department of Automatic Control Engineering & Master Program of Biomedical Informatics and Biomedical Engineering,
Feng-Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan, ROC
Abstract—In this study, we develop an efficient lossless ECG
compression based on delta coding and optimal selective
Huffman coding and implement the proposed algorithm in the
S3C2440 development board. The delta coding is applied to
reduce the dynamic range of the original ECG signals. The
optimal selective Huffman coding is used to enhance the com-
putation efficiency of canonical Huffman coding. In order to
evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, a 10-min
ECG recordings (MIT100) which is a normal sinus rhythm
taken from the MIT/BIH database were applied to the coding
experiments. Comparing with the canonical Huffman coding
algorithm, the proposed algorithm has gained much improve-
ment on the computation efficiency by 211.2% when the first
63 frequently occurring codewords are selected, although
slightly sacrificing the compression rate by 0.34%.
Keywords—Lossless ECG Compression, Delta Coding, Op-
timal Selective Huffman Coding.
I. INTRODUCTION
An electrocardiogram (ECG) contains useful physiologi-
cal information on the physical condition of the heart. A
portable ECG recorder is common used to measure transient
responses of cardiac electrical activity for a period of time
24 hours or longer. The memory requirements for such a
long ECG signal are very huge and can significantly in-
crease the recorder’s size and cost. Therefore, ECG signal
compression is required to reduce the size of the stored data.
Moreover, the decompressed ECG signals must contain
sufficient message for clinical doctors to be able to diagnose
electrical activities in the heart and further data processing.
Lossy compression algorithms likely neglect some features
that may be desired for further analysis of ECG signals. On
the other hand, lossless compression algorithms can keep
the signal exactly as measured.
Several researches of lossless ECG compression were in-
vestigated. Koski [1] used LZ77, complex extraction, and
Huffman coding for lossless ECG compression. Giurcâne-
anu et al. [2] proposed a lossless scheme using contexts and
R-R interval estimation. Miaou and Chao [3] proposed a
lossless ECG compression method based on wavelet trans-
form and vector quantization.
C.T. Lim and J.C.H. Goh (Eds.): WCB 2010, IFMBE Proceedings 31, pp. 1327–1330, 2010.
www.springerlink.com
Huffman code is an optimal statistical code that is veri-
fied to generate the shortest average codeword length
among all uniquely decodable variable length codes [4].
However, the compression of canonical Huffman coding
needs a full predefined probability distribution table. This
makes canonical Huffman coding not practical for encoding
time varying data in real-time. To alleviate this problem,
optimal selective Huffman coding was proposed in [5]
which just needs a partial probability distribution table but it
may slightly sacrifice the compression ratio. Optimal selec-
tive Huffman is a more efficient algorithm that allows the
utilization of the compression advantages of canonical
Huffman coding in the lossless ECG compression.
Considering practical applications, ECG compression al-
gorithm should have an adequate compression rate and must
be operated in real-time. In this paper, delta coding is firstly
used to transform the original ECG sequence into a new
sequence which has a smaller variance and dynamic range.
Next, we employ optimal selective Huffman coding to
compress the delta encoded ECG signal. Subsequently, we
implement the proposed algorithm in the S3C2440 devel-
opment board.
II. METHODS
A. Delta Coding
ECG is a waveform signal. The successive samples of
ECG signal have a very high correction and small differ-
ences between them. This small difference signal will have
a much lower dynamic range than the original ECG signal,
so it can be effectively quantized using a smaller number of
bits by some coding methods, like delta coding. Fig. 1
shows an example of how delta coding is performed. The
first sample in the encoded signal is equal to the first sample
of the original ECG signal. Subsequent encoded samples are
equal to the difference between the current sample and the
previous sample of the original ECG signal.
1328
Fig. 1 Delta coding example
B. Huffman Coding
Huffman coding is an entropy encoding algorithm used
for lossless data compression. It uses the most frequently
occurring symbols with short codewords and the less fre-
quently occurring ones with long codewords. A Huffman
code is created by constructing a binary tree. The path from
the root to each leaf gives the codeword of different symbol
for the bit sequence of the edges passing through the path.
An example of constructing a Huffman code can be shown
in Table 1 and Figs. 2. Table I shows the frequency of oc-
currence of each of the possible symbols. Fig. 2 displays the
full Huffman tree. Table II presents the compressed data
given in Table 1.
Table 1 Data Set, Occurrence Frequency, and Codewords
Fig. 2 The full Huffman tree
IFMBE Proceedings Vol. 31
G.C. Chang and Y.D. Lin
Table 2 Compressed data set using full Huffman coding
C. Optimal Selective Huffman Coding
Assume k different symbols, s1, s2, …, sk, with frequen-
cies of occurrence p1 ≥ p2 ≥ … ≥ pk, respectively. The opti-
mal selective Huffman coding only uses m+1 Huffman
codewords, m for encoding the m most frequently occurring
symbols, s1, s2, …, sm (m < k), and 1 for indicating the rest,
sm+1, …, sk, unencoded symbols. The occurrence probability
of the latter codeword is equal to the sum of the occurrence
probabilities of all the unencoded different symbols.
Consider the data set of Table 1 and let m = 3, that is,
0001 and 0010 are the unencoded symbols. The sum of the
occurrence probabilities of 0001 and 0010 is equal to 3/20.
Fig. 3 shows the optimal selective Huffman tree. Table 3
presents the compressed data using optimal selective Huff-
man coding.
Fig. 3 The optimal selective Huffman tree
Table 3 Compressed data set using optimal selective Huffman coding
An Efficient Lossless ECG Compression Method Using Delta Coding and Optimal Selective Huffman Coding 1329

III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS Table 4 The probability of occurrence of each distinct symbol in MIT100
ECG signal
In order to analyze the performance of the proposed algo-
rithm described here, a 10-min ECG recordings (MIT100)
which is a normal sinus rhythm taken from the MIT/BIH [6]
database were applied in the coding experiments. The sam-
pling frequency is 360 Hz with 12 bits per sample. Fig. 4(a)
shows the original ECG signal selected from record
MIT100. Fig. 4(b) presents the delta encoded ECG signal. It
can be seen that the dynamic range of the original ECG
signal has been limited between -100 and 100 which can be
represented by 8-bit per sample.

Next, the optimal selective Huffman coding is used to

Fig. 4 (a) The first 5 seconds original ECG signal (b) The delta encoded
ECG signal of Fig. 4(a)
After delta encoding, the probability of occurrence of
each distinct symbol in MIT100 ECG signal is calculated
and is presented in Fig. 5 and Table 4. According to the
probability of occurrence of all distinct symbols, we obtain
168 Huffman codewords. The compression rate using the
full Huffman coding achieves 3.109155.
compress the delta encoded ECG signal. Table 5 shows the
number of selected Huffman codeword, compression rate,
and computation time. It can be observed from Table 5 that
when the number of selected Huffman codeword decreases,
the computation time significantly shortens but the com-
pression rate slightly decreases.
Table 5 The number of selected Huffman codeword, compression rate, and
computation time

Fig. 5 The probability of occurrence of each distinct symbol

IFMBE Proceedings Vol. 31

1330
IV. CONCLUSION
This paper develops and implements an efficient lossless
ECG compression based on delta coding and optimal selec-
tive Huffman coding. Comparing with the canonical Huff-
man coding algorithm, the proposed algorithm has obtained
much improvement on the computation efficiency by
211.2% when the first 63 frequently occurring codewords
are selected, although slightly sacrificing the compression
rate by 0.34%. It can be observed that the proposed algo-
rithm is an efficient, feasible, and practical for compressing
EMG signals in real-time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding provided
to this project by the National Science Council (NSC 98-
2221-E-214-020), Taiwan, ROC.
IFMBE Proceedings Vol. 31
G.C. Chang and Y.D. Lin
REFERENCES
1. Koski A (1997) Lossless ECG encoding. Comput Meth Prog Biomed
52:23–33.
2. Duda K, Turcza P, Zielinski TP (2001) Lossless ECG encoding with
lifting wavelet transform. IEEE International Conf. on Instrumentation
and Measurement Technology, Budapest, Hungary, 2001, pp. 640–
644.
3. Miaou S and Chao S (2005) Wavelet-based lossy-to-lossless ECG
compression in a unified vector quantization framework. IEEE Trans.
Biomed. Eng., 52:539–543.
4. Huffman DA (1952) A Method for the Construction of Minimum Re-
dundancy Codes. Proceedings of the Inst. Radio Engineers 40:1098-
1101.
5. Kavousianos X, Kalligeros E, Nikolos D (2007) Optimal Selective
Huffman Coding for Test-Data Compression. IEEE Trans. on Com-
puters 56:1146-1152.
6. MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database CD-ROM, Third ed. Cambridge, MI:
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, May 1997.