Semi-blind Fetal Electrocardiogram Extraction By
Eliminating the Cross-terms of the Wigner-Ville
Representations
Cai Kun
School of Electronic and
Information Engineering
South China University of Technology
Guangzhou, Guangdong, China, 510641
College of Engineering
South China Agricultural University,
Guangzhou, Guangdong, China, 510641
Email: caikun@scau.edu.cn
Abstract—Blind source separation methods on time-frequency
representations usually use kernel functions, like Cohen class
time-frequency representations, to suppress the useless cross-
terms of the sources produced by the mixture operation before
further processing. However, for sparse signals like maternal
ECG and fetal ECG, cross-terms are not thought to be useless
and interference. In this context, by introducing the cross-term
of spatial Wigner-Ville distributions to the contrast function, a
new semi-blind source separation method is proposed to extract
fECG from the mixed abdominal signals. Experiments on real-
world clinical data show that the proposed method is comparable
to the FastICA.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) is one of the important
fetal monitoring methods, which contains crucial information
about physiological states of a fetus within the uterine [1].
For instance, hypoxia and acidemia can be diagnosed from
the fECG waveform. Since fECG is usually acquired from the
skin electrodes attached on the mother’s abdomen, it implies a
strong advantage of this noninvasive recording method for fetal
monitoring in comparison to methods like Doppler ultrasound
[2]. However, extracting fECG from abdominal signals (ADS)
is a most challenge work in fetal monitoring. The main
problem is that the ADS not only contains the fECG, but is
contaminated by several other interferences, such as maternal
ECG (mECG), power-line interference, baseline wandering,
and the myoelectric crosstalk from abdominal muscles, and
etc. In addition, some of them have greater amplitudes than
fECG for several times, and overlap with the fECG source in
the frequency domain. Thus, fECG extraction attracts lots of
research efforts all around the world [3],[4].
Blind source separation (BSS) is an emerging technique
used in many applications. Among the BSS algorithms, in-
dependent component analysis (ICA) methods are frequently
proposed for the fECG extraction. By maximizing the 2nd-
order correlation between the extracted signal and the refer-
978-1-4244-5089-3/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
Xie Shengli
School of Electronic and
Information Engineering
South China University of Technology
Guangzhou, Guangdong, China, 510641
Email: adshlxie@scut.edu.cn
ence signal, Sato [5] invented blind source separation with the
reference signal (BSSR). Zhang [6] introduced the temporal
correlation to the kurtosis-based ICA algorithm, and Zhang [7]
changed the contrast function to a likelihood criterion instead
of the statistical kurtosis. They all have a good performance
from the experiments. Compared with ICA, applying the
statistic methods to the whole observations, Woolfson [8]
discovered that the abdominal observations are mixtured by
the sources, fECG and mECG, which are sparse – that is
each source has zero amplitude for some of the time, and the
minimum heading change (MHC) method was proposed to
extract fECG by localization of the segments where the fECG
and mECG are sparse.
Another class of blind source separation techniques are the
algorithms on a time-frequency plane [9], where Cohen class
time-frequency distributions are used to represent the signals.
In the procedure, different kernels are used to smooth the
time-frequency distributions of the signals on the t-f plane.
Moreover, another purpose of kernels is to remove the cross-
terms produced by the quadratic time-frequency transform,
which will cause serious interference to the further joint
diagnoalization of a set of spatial time-frequency distributions.
However, these cross-terms are not thought to be useless and
must be removed by kernels in advance; they can help to
separate sources from the mixtures, especially when sources
are sparse. In this context, according to the sparseness of the
signals, a new BSS method is proposed for fECG extraction by
eliminating the cross-terms of the Wigner-Ville distributions of
the mixtures.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The next
section will recall the connections between BSS and the spatial
Wigner-Ville distribution of signals. In section III, we will
introduce the new extracting method in the time-frequency
domain. In section IV, experiments will be made to evaluate
the performance of the proposed method on real clinical data
with FastICA. In practice, because the available observations are limit in the
fetal monitoring, the SWVD is a rough estimation of SWVS.
II. P ROBLEM F ORMULATION Let DW V
xx (t, f ) denote as
WV

A. Models
WV Dx1 ,x1 (t, f ) DxW1 ,xV
(t, f )
Dxx (t, f ) = 2
(9)
We assume the problem satisfy the noise-free linear instan- DxW2 ,x
V
1
(t, f ) DxW2 ,x
V
2
(t, f )
taneous mixtured model of BSS, which is where
 ∞
x(t) = As(t) (1) τ ∗ τ
DxWi ,x
V
(t, f ) = )xj (t − )exp(−j2πf τ )dτ,
xi (t +
j
−∞ 2 2
where the observation vector is denoted by x(t) =
i, j = 1, 2
[x1 (t), x2 (t)]T , s(t) = [s1 (t), s2 (t)]T consists of the source
(10)
signals – mECG and fECG, A is the unknown 2-by-2 mixing
are called the cross Wigner-Ville distribution (XWVD) of xi
matrix.
and xj . When i = j(i, j = 1, 2), DxWi ,x V
j
(t, f ) becomes the
The aim of BSS is to estimate a demixing matrix W, Wigner-Ville distribution of xi , (i = 1, 2).
which can be seen as the pseudo-inverse of A, up to the
indeterminacies on ordering, scale. Thus, the demixing model III. T HE P ROPOSED M ETHOD
of BSS is written by A. Cross-terms produced by the mixture
y(t) = Wx(t) = WAs(t) = s(t) (2) In some publications related to BSS on time-frequency
representations, the cross-terms of Wigner-Ville distribution
Consequently, the source signals are recovered by W, and are considered as interference, and must be suppressed by
y(t) = [y1 (t), y2 (t)]T is the estimation of the sources. kernel functions before further processing. However, in this
paper, the cross-terms will be introduced to the contrast
B. The Wigner-Ville Representations function to help the source separation. Firstly, we will revise
The source signals s(t) are assume to be uncorrelated, which the cross-terms of SWVD generated by the mixture.
means Let the mixing matrix
 τ τ 

Rss (t, τ ) = E s(t + )sH (t − ) A=

a11 a12
(11)
2 2 (3) a21 a22
= diag [r11 (t, τ ), r22 (t, τ )]
  then (1) can be expanded as follows
where rii (t, τ ) = E si (t + τ2 )s∗i (t − τ2 ) , i = 1, 2, the
x1 (t) = a11 s1 (t) + a12 s2 (t) (12)
superscript∗ denotes complex conjugate, and diag[] is a 2-by-
2 diagonal matrix. The mixing matrix A is assumed to have x2 (t) = a21 s1 (t) + a22 s2 (t) (13)
full column rank but is otherwise unknown. Thus, using (1),
the covariance matrix Rxx (t, τ ) of x(t) is Substituting (12), (13) to (10), each element of (9) can be
obtained. For simplicity, we choose DxW1 ,x
V
1
(t, f ) to expand
Rxx (t, τ ) = Adiag [r11 (t, τ ), r22 (t, τ )] AH (4) and write as follows.

A strictly equivalent t-f representation of x(t) is obtained via DxW1 ,x

V
1
(t, f ) = a211 DsW1 ,sV1 (t, f ) + a11 a12 DsW1 ,sV2 (t, f )
(14)
the Fourier transform of Rxx (t, τ ) with respect to τ , yielding +a11 a12 DsW2 ,sV1 (t, f ) + a212 DsW2 ,sV2 (t, f )
the spatial Wigner-Ville Spectrum (SWVS) [9] of x(t)
 ∞ where DsW1 ,sV1 (t, f ) and DsW2 ,sV2 (t, f ) are the auto-terms of
source signals; DsW1 ,sV2 (t, f ) and DsW2 ,sV1 (t, f ), shown as
SW V Sxx (t, f ) = Rxx (t, τ )exp(−j2πf τ )dτ (5)
−∞ XWVD, will produce the cross-terms generated by the mix-
ture.
In a t-f plane, (4) becomes
B. The extraction algorithm
SW V Sxx (t, f ) = ASW V Sss (t, f )AH (6)
Before the source signals are mixed, cross-terms between
where SW V Sss (t, f ) is a diagonal matrix for all (t, f ) points, them will not exist. Thus, by eliminating the cross-terms
since it is the Fourier transform of the diagonal covariance of source signals, the sources, fECG and mECG, can be
matrix Rss . The SWVS of x(t) can be estimated by recovered from the mixed ADS. Then, the contrast function
  of the proposed method is
SW V Sxx (t, f ) = E DW V
xx (t, f ) (7)
wT DW V
xx (tc , fc )w
minJ(w) = , i = 1, 2 (15)
where DW
xx
V
(t, f ) is called Spatial Wigner-Ville Distributions W V
wT Dxx (tia , fai )w
(SWVD), and is defined by
 ∞ where the vector w, one of the columns of the separation
τ τ matrix W in (2), can be used to extract the specified source;
DW V
(t, f ) = x(t + )xH (t − )exp(−j2πf τ )dτ (8)
xx
−∞ 2 2 DW V
xx (tc , fc ) refers to the cross-term caused by the mixture
 0.15
of fECG and mECG; DW V i i
xx (ta , fa ) represents the auto-term 0.1
i i
of the i-th source at(ta , fa ) on the t-f plane. Because both 0.05

x1
mECG and fECG are sparse, the auto-terms and cross-terms 0

−0.05
of them can be found on the t-f plane. −0.1
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

DW V
(tia , fai ) DW V
(tc , fc ) determination
Second
C. xx and xx
0.15

It is very critical to search auto-terms and cross-terms of 0.1

two source signals, because the performance of the proposed 0.05

x2
algorithm depends on this phase. The procedure is arranged 0

−0.05
in the following 2 steps: −0.1
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
1) Localize the segment where fECG and mECG are Second

sparse;
2) Represent the sparse segment of observations with Fig. 1. Observations
Wigner-Ville distribution, and substitute the real and
DX11 DX12
positive maximum of the auto-terms and cross-terms to
the DW V i i WV
xx (ta , fa ) and Dxx (tc , fc ), respectively.
10 10
20 20

In the procedure, Step 1 is critical, and Woolfson’s method[8] 30

40
30
40
can help to solve this problem. Since the Wigner-Ville distribu- 50 50

tion of a signal may produce unreasonable negative energy, the 60

10 20 30 40 50 60
60
10 20 30 40 50 60

proposed algorithm requires positive maximum to determine DX21 DX22

DW V i i WV
xx (ta , fa ) and Dxx (tc , fc ). 10 10
20 20

IV. E XPERIMENTS ON R EAL - WORLD DATA 30 30

1 2 3
40 40
In this section, real-world observations are used to evaluate 50 50
60 60
the performance of the proposed method. The data is from a 10 20 30 40 50 60 10 20 30 40 50 60

pregnant woman in 29-week gestation. The hardware of the

Fig. 2. Absolute Spatial Wigner-Ville Distribution of the Sparse Segment
data acquisition is designed by our group. Figure 1 shows the
ADS with the removal of baseline wander and the suppression The Proposed Method
of power-line interference. The rectangular selection region 0.02

depicted in x2 is the segment where both fECG and mECG 0.01

are sparse. 0

As the Wigner-Ville transform may produce complex re- −0.01

sults, the absolute spatial Wigner-Ville distributions of the −0.02

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

sparse part of observations are shown in figure 2. DX11, FastICA

DX12, DX21, and DX22 refer to DxW1 ,x V

1
(t, f ), DxW1 ,x
V
2
(t, f ), 5

WV WV
Dx2 ,x1 (t, f ), and Dx2 ,x2 (t, f ), respectively. On the t-f plane
of DX22, the patterns pointed by the white arrows marked 0

with 1, 2 and 3 are the absolute Wigner-Ville representations

of fECG, the cross-terms, and mECG, respectively. Moreover, −5
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

despite of the variances of the strength of the t-f components,

Fig. 3. The Results obtained by the Proposed Method and FastICA
the same patterns are found in the same locations on the other
3 planes. Thus, we can index the auto-term and the cross-term
on either one of the planes with a better SNR.
kernel functions, Cohen class time-frequency representations
The results obtained by the proposed method and FastICA
can successfully do it. In this context, however, the cross-
are demonstrated in figure 3. Compared with the 2 signals,
term is introduced to the source separation of sparse signals
both methods extract fECG efficiently, and the results from
like fECG and mECG. By eliminating the cross-term of the
them are comparable.
spatial Wigner-Ville distribution, the fECG can be recovered
V. C ONCLUSION from the mixed abdominal signals. The experiments on real-
The first step of most blind source separation methods world clinical data show that the performance of the proposed
on time-frequency planes uses Cohen class time-frequency method is comparable to the FastICA.
transform to represent the observations on time-frequency
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
planes. The cross-terms of the sources produced by the
mixture operation are considered as interference, and must The authors would like to thank the support from Na-
be removed before the joint diagonalization of a set of tional Basic Research Program of China (973 Program, No.
spatial time-frequency distributions. Aided with the different 2010CB731800), National Natural Science Foundation of
China (Grant U0635001, U0835003, 60874061, 60974072),
and Guangdong International cooperative reserch projection
2009B050700020.
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