A Novel Methodology for Calculating Heart Rate using Images Processing

Detection of the peak-R in an electrocardiogram (ECG) is commonly provided with ambiguities due to inaccuracies acquisition system. Medical experts must thus be highly concerned about the real peak-R and his location in order to calculate heart rate (HR) with high accuracy and minimum error. We carry out a new technique of ECG display and show that it is possible to locate peak-R using image processing. We suggest an algorithm based on FIR Filter by window Kaiser at the pre-processing stage combined with a threshold to detect high amplitudes. The thresholding stage is based on Otsu's method, which calculates the optimum level of threshold, when the variance between classes is minimum. We test some ECG signals from MIT-BIH research database by this methodology and we compared our heart rate calculation against the standard (MIT-BIH)