EXTRACTION OF ECG FROM SINGLE CHANNEL EMG SIGNAL USING
CONSTRAINED SINGULAR SPECTRUM ANALYSIS
Saeid Sanei and Ahmadreza Hosseini-Yazdi
Nature-Inspired Computing and Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences University
of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK, Email: S.Sanei@Surrey.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
A simple and extremely effective method for extraction of
electrocardiography (ECG) signal from noisy single channel
noisy electromyography (EMG) signal has been developed.
The method is based on singular spectrum analysis, where
the subspace of interest is estimated by incorporation of a
priori information. The method is applied to a number of
real data sequences. The performance of the algorithm is
both subjectively and objectively assessed and the results
are compared with those of the well known adaptive line
enhancer (ALE) since at least one of the components, i.e.
ECG, is quasi-periodic. It is demonstrated that the proposed
subspace method significantly outperforms ALE.
Index Terms—EMG, Constrained SSA, ECG, ALE.
1. INTRODUCTION
EMG signals provide valuable information relating to
peripheral and central motor functions and have been
widely adopted in the study of motor function and
movement disorders. Surface EMGs represent a
superposition of electrical activities from motor unit action
potentials located subcutaneous to the detecting electrodes.
Surface EMGs have previously been applied quantitatively
to assess muscular activity and diagnose various muscular
disorders. These signals however are nonstationary and
often available using only single-channel recordings. Most
of EMG signals are corrupted by ECG mainly because the
blood vessels are spread all over the body. This problem is
more severe when the muscles around heart and main
arteries are to be investigated. Restoration of EMG signals
from artefacts is extremely difficult mainly due to their
randomness and being noisy in nature. There have been
some attempts in denoising the EMG signals recently such
as that in [1] where wavelet and ICA have been used for a
multichannel recording of EMG. Unfortunately, not always
more than one channel recording is available. Moreover,
generally the conditions of independency and stationarity of
the signal components are not fully satisfied. In a very
recent attempt by Lu et al. [2] an adaptive noise canceller
(ANC) based on recursive-least-squares (RLS) algorithm
climatology, economics, biology, physics, medicine and
other sciences where short and long, one-dimensional and
multidimensional, stationary and ©2011
nonstationary,
978-1-4577-0274-7/11/$26.00 IEEE almost
deterministic and noisy time series are to be analyzed. A
comparison between SSA and other classical methods can
was developed for removing ECG artefact from surface
EMGs recorded in patients with cervical dystonia. Even in
this approach an ECG signal recorded from a separate
channel was used as a reference signal. However, so far, to
the authors knowledge, no prior attempts have been made to
separate noisy ECG and EMG signals from a single channel
recording without a reference component.
For the first time in this paper a subspace-based method
called singular spectrum analysis (SSA) [3] is used to
effectively separate ECG signal from the EMG at the
presence of very high-level noise. No reference ECG signal
is used either. Here, the traditional SSA has been modified
to incorporate some statistical characteristics of the signal
(ECG artefact). This was done to select the subspace of
interest for an accurate and effective separation of the ECG
from the noisy EMG recording. We call this method
constrained SSA (CSSA). The method is compared with
adaptive line enhancer (ALE) [10], as the benchmark for de-
noising periodic single-channel signals. Unlike for ALE,
here, no reference is used. Instead, the quasi-periodic nature
of the ECG is taken into account. The result of the CSSA
approach is remarkable. High performance of the method
can be easily verified both subjectively and objectively as
explained in the following sections.
2. CONSTRAINED SSA
The basic SSA method consists of two complementary
stages: decomposition and reconstruction; each stage
includes two separate steps. In the first step the series is
decomposed and in the second stage the original series is
reconstructed and used for further analysis. The main
concept in studying the properties of SSA is separability,
which characterizes how well different components can be
separated from each other. The absence of approximate
separability is often observed in series with complex
structure. For these series and series with special structure,
there are different ways of modifying SSA leading to
different versions such as SSA with single and double
centering, Toeplitz SSA, and sequential SSA [3].
SSA is becoming an effective and powerful tool for time
series analysis in meteorology, hydrology, geophysics,
component (note that if 1 >> 2, the information energy
will be mostly concentrated in the most dominant matrix
X1  1u1v1 associated with the first singular values).
be seen in [4]. In addition, the method has several essential
extensions [5]. The SSA is carried out in two stages;
decomposition and reconstruction. A brief description of the
SSA stages is given in the following subsections (for more
information see [3]).
2.1. Decomposition
This stage includes an embedding operation followed by
singular value decomposition (SVD). Embedding operation
maps a one-dimensional time series f into a k×l matrix with
rows of length l as
X  {xij }  [x1 , x2 ,..., xk ]
 f1 f2 . . fk 1 
f0 
 .
 f1 f2 f3 . . . fk 
  f2 f3 f4 . . f (1)
 I
.
k 1
 
 ⁝ ⁝ ⁝ ⋱ ⁝ 
 f l 1 fl . . fr 1 
 f
l 1 .
with vectors xi = [fi-1, fi, . . . , fi+l+2]T  RL , where k = r - l
+1 is the window length (1 l  r), and subscript T denotes
the transpose of a vector. Vectors xi are called l-lagged
vectors (or, simply, lagged vectors). The window length l
should be sufficiently large. Note that the trajectory matrix
X is a Hankel matrix, which means that all the elements
along the diagonal i + j = const. are equal.
In the SVD stage the SVD of the trajectory matrix is
computed and represented as sum of rank-one bi-orthogonal
elementary matrices. Consider the eigenvalues of the
covariance matrix Cx = XXT are denoted by 1, . . ., l in
decreasing order of magnitude (¸1  . . .  l  0) and the
corresponding orthogonal eigenvectors by u1, . . ., ul. Set d
= max(i; such that i > 0) = rank(X): If we denote
vi  XT ui i , then the SVD of the trajectory matrix
can be written as:
d d
X   Xi   i ui vTi (2)
i1 i1
Here, the objective is to separate the subspace of the
two constituent components of noisy MEG and ECG. These
components are separated through a constrained procedure
of configuring X and the SVD operation. Since the desired
signal might have different energy level, in this work, there
won’t be any assumption about the relationship between the
order of the eigenvalues and the physiologically dominant
m << M for the signal reconstruction. The desired
2.2. Reconstruction
During reconstruction the elementary matrices are first split
into several groups (depending on the number of
components in the time series – in this application EMG and
ECG signals, the matrices within each group are added
together). The size of the group or in other words, the length
of each subspace may be specified based on some a priori
information. In the case of ECG removal from recorded
EMGs this feature and the desired component are jointly
(and automatically) identified based on a constraint on the
statistical properties of the signal to be extracted. Let I = {i1,
. . . , ip} be the indices corresponding to the p eigenvalues of
the desired component. Then the matrix X corresponding
ˆ
I
to the group I is defined as
ip
X   ji1 X . In splitting
ˆ
I
j
the set of indices J = {1, . . . , d} into disjoint subsets I1 to Im
we always have
X m (3)
Xˆ
j
jI1
The procedure of choosing the sets I1, . . . Im is called
eigentriple grouping. For a given group I the contribution of
the component XI in expansion (3) is measured by
contribution of the corresponding eigenvalues:
iI i i1
d
. In the next step the obtained matrix is
 i
transformed to the form of a Hankel matrix which can be
subsequently converted to a time series. If zij stands for an
element of a matrix Z, then the k-th term of the resulting
series is obtained by averaging zij over all i,j such that i+j =
k +1. This procedure is called diagonal averaging or
Hankelization of matrix Z. A recursive SSA algorithm has
been developed recently [6]. Such a method is advantageous
for real-time processing of the data.
2.3. Constrained SSA
Comparing the background EMG and ECG, it is seen that
the ECG has limited duration time and often with relatively
larger amplitude. As a result, distribution of such a signal is
sharper (and often skewed toward left) than a quasi-
Gaussian distribution, making the kurtosis larger than that
of the EMG. Therefore, the distribution is super-Gaussian
for the ECG and clearly Gaussian or sub-Gaussian for the
EMG. This property can be enforced into the SSA
reconstruction algorithm as a constraint. A similar
constraint may be imposed by means of skewness. The first
signal component is reconstructed from the eigentriples of
the covariance of the Hankel matrix by sliding a window
over the eigenvalues and select m out of M of them, where
reconstructed signal (ECG) is sum of the signals
reconstructed from the eigenvalues (and their corresponding number of eigentriples 240, the window length 2, while the
eigenvectors) within the window in order to have maximum threshold varied from segment to segment.
kurtosis. Other simple criteria such as peak to variance ratio
of the reconstructed signals or more complex ones may also
be adopted.
Another important parameter is the subspace size of
the desired component. For stronger signals the eigenvalues
are in the lower subspaces and for weaker signals their
values fall within higher-band subspaces (usually where the
noise components are). Generally, a signal component can
have eigenvalues in one or more distinct regions of the
eigenspace. Both cases are present in this study. Therefore,
to select an optimum m (may be denoted as b) the following
constrained problem can be solved iteratively using a
hierarchical search procedure:
b  min(m)
m
(4)
Fig. 1. Separation of EMG and ECG signals using the traditional
s.t. having maxKurt[st ] & min  si , s j  ALE; top signal is the measuremet, middle signal is the separated
where Kurt denotes kurtosis operation and shows how ECG, and in the bottom row the EMG signal can be viewed.
peaky the signal distribution is, <,> refers to the
correlation between ECG and the rest of the signals, which Both ALE and the proposed CSSA are examined here. In
in this case this condition is inherently satisfied, and st the ALE, the reference signal is a delayed replication of the
primary signal. Hence, if the autocorrelation coefficients of
refers to the source of interest which in this case is the pure
ECG. The r value also slightly varies with the total set value the noise decay much faster than that of the signal,
for d. Due to the limited window length and the number of appropriate delay would ensure correlation of the primary
sliding lags the overall searching time is short (md). The and secondary signal components (i.e., delayed primary) but
EMG component is then easily extracted by subtracting the not that the noise components. Therefore, ALE would be a
estimated ECG from the original signal; well established adaptive filtering approach for restoration
j b of periodic signals. After processing the data using ALE and
EMG   yt 
 (5) the proposed CSSA the segments were joined together to
st yˆ t k  j reconstruct the complete ECG and EMG components. The
1

Assuming that the signal with (j+1)th to (j+b)th eigentriple
has the maximum kurtosis (or peak to variance ratio). Here,
yˆ t is the kth reconstructed component of the signal. It
is interesting to know that often the subspace of the ECG
falls within few last eigenvalues where the noise subspace is
(the EMG is stronger than the ECG here).
3. RESTORATION OF EMG FROM ECG
A comprehensive experiment was performed on real EMG.
corrupted by noise and ECG. The EMG signals were from
human forearm recorded using surface EMG. The sampling
frequency was 2 KHz and the subject was relatively relaxed
during slow arm movements. The overall recorded data
length was 70 seconds (140Kdata samples), divided into
20K sample segments (10 sec each). In these experiments
no preprocessing was performed. Therefore, the noisy EMG
remained un-altered and the ECG was completely separated.
For the CSSA all parameters were automatically set as the
two methods, the correlation coefficients of both
normalized eparated signal components,
 N 1 EMG(i)  , N = 140000 samples,
ECG(i)
 N i1
data were available from 11 subjects each recorded two
times, not necessarily from the same position. However, for
illustration, only one segment of one record from one of the
subjects (selected randomly with no preference) was taken.
Figure 1 shows the results of ALE application. Figure 2
illustrates the results of application of the proposed CSSA
to the same signal segment. In both figures the original
segment has been given in the top row. The separated ECG
is in the middle row and at the bottom the remaining EMG
(often noisy) is shown. What is very important here is that
the separated ECG using the proposed CSSA method can be
directly used for diagnosis of heart clinical status. In other
methods, such as ALE, the separated ECG is not of
sufficient quality to be used as an indicator of heart
function. Therefore, the proposed method can indeed be
used for extraction of ECG from noisy EMG easily.
Primary objective in separation is that the estimated
components be independent or uncorrelated. Therefore, as a
quantitative or objective assessment when comparing these
presenting synthetic data results and secondly, the high
noise level can be easily seen in the mixed signals in
Figures 1 and 2. Preliminary stages of this technique have
are calculated. As depicted in Table 1, the value of this
coefficient for the ALE output is ALE = 0.121, whereas for
the output of the proposed CSSA this coefficient is
negligible ( CSSA = 0.0016).
Fig. 2. Separation of EMG and ECG using the proposed CSSA
technique; top signal is the measuremet, middle signal is the
separated ECG, and the EMG signal can be viewed at the bottom.
TABLE I. Correlation coefficient between the estimated ECG and
EMG using both ALE and CSSA methods.
ALE CSSA
 0.121 0.0016
4. CONCLUDING REMARKS
In this new application of constrained SSA developed by
our research group single channel combination of ECG and
EMG signals are decomposed without use of any reference
signal. The effectiveness of the proposed CSSA is
extremely high mainly because the signal components have
distinct subspaces in the covariance eigentriple space of the
augmented Hankel matrix. What is important in this single
channel source separation is to have the components
statistically defined and are with measurable charac-
teristics. In most of the cases such as in the above work, this
can be achieved easily. As clarified before, prior to
application of CSSA no preprocessing is necessary. The
assessment against noise level hasn’t been included in this
work because firstly, there is shortage of space for
also been applied to decomposition of biomedical signals
successfully [7][8][9].
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We wish to thank Dr. K. Nazarpour from University of
Newcastle, UK, for providing the data.
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