Fetal ECG extraction using time-frequency analysis techniques

Fetal Electrocardiogram (FECG) is used to know the information of the fetal's health. However, the extraction of FECG from the maternal abdominal wall remains an open problem due to various kinds of interferences and noises. Many techniques are available in the literature to detect Fetal ECG. In this paper an attempt is made to extract the FECG using the combination of the commonly used Independent Component Analysis (ICA) technique with the Time Frequency Representation (TFR) on the daISy database. Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) and stockwell-Transform are used for the time frequency representation. Results prove that the time frequency based analysis using stockwell-Transform outperforms the STFT and can be used effectively for the extraction of the FECG. All simulations are carried out using MATLAB.