An ECG compression scheme based on vector quantisation

An ECG signal compression scheme based on the vector quantisation (VQ) method is proposed. The compression is performed by quantising the ECG samples into a reduced set of reference vectors, the codebook. The vector representing elements with a high frequency of occurrence is selected for further coding, while the rest of the signal containing all the values occurring with lower probabilities are kept unchanged. The proposed scheme is superior to other available direct compression methods in retaining the most important part of the ECG signal.