Watermarking of ECG signals compressed using Fourier decomposition method

Abstract

Secure and efficient transmission of biomedical signals containing delicate and vital health information of a subject over the network is challenging. Digital watermarking is an attractive choice for the secure and reliable transmission of biomedical signals using smart healthcare devices. This paper proposes a method that integrates watermarking and compression of an electrocardiogram (ECG) of a subject. ECG watermarking secures the cardiac information of a subject, while signal compression reduces the amount of data. In this study, a sequence of binary ones and zeros are used as a watermark to secure the ECG signal. The watermarked ECG signal is analyzed and compressed by the Fourier decomposition method by removing the redundant component present in the ECG signal. The proposed method is validated using the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. Percentage root-mean-square difference (PRD), the output signal to noise ratio (SNR), compression ratio, and computation time are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Results show that the proposed method reduces the PRD by a factor of three, and the compression ratio increases by a factor of two. The proposed algorithm is evaluated at different input SNR values. The improved output SNR demonstrates the denoising capabilities of the watermarked signal. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.