2015 International Conference on Advances in Biomedical Engineering (ICABME)

Uterine Electromyography signals denoising using

discrete wavelet transform
Manel LIMEM

Mohamed Ali HAMDI

Departement of Physics and Intrumentation

National Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology
Tunis, Tunisia
E mail: limem.manel@gmail.com

Departement of Physics and I ntrumentation

National Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology
Tunis, Tunisia
E mail: mohamedalihamdi@yahoo.fr

Abstract This paper introduces the application of the

discrete wavelet transform in noise reduction of real uterine
Electromyography (EMG) signals. With the appropriate choice of
the wavelet function and the selection of the suitable
decomposition level, its possible to remove interference noise
effectively. Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) values are calculated to
evaluate the global performance of noise reduction. Results show
that wavelet function db4 at three level of decomposition
performs denoising best out of the other wavelets. Furthermore, a
comparative analysis using the band-pass Butterworth filter
demonstrates the superior denoising performance of the proposed
algorithm.
Keywords uterine EMG, wavelet function, denoising, SNR

I.

INTRODUCTION

Uterine EMG is a promising technique for monitoring

uterine activity, started since the 1980s. This signal is obtained
non-invasively by using surface electrodes attached to the
pregnant womans abdomen [1, 2].
Because the uterine EMG is an external signal, and in spite
of the analogical band-pass filtering during acquisition, the
EMG is still corrupted by electronic and electromagnetic
noises and by the remaining electrocardiogram of the mother
[3, 4]. Indeed, the parameters calculated from a noisy signal
would be strongly distorted by the presence of noise. An
efficient denoising is, thus required for a proper contraction
characterization. According to the literature, several studies
have reported techniques to remove noise from EMG signals
by applying digital filters [5, 6]. Although such filters can
reduce the noise considerably, they also introduce distortion to
the EMG signal [7]. More advanced techniques have been
developed for noise cancellation from EMG signals such as
adaptive filtering [8, 9]. Unfortunately, this technique require
an extra channel to record a reference noise signal, which
consumes amount of time for computation.
Recently, the wavelet denoising theory has been found very
effective in denoising a number of physiological signals [1013]. It is preferred over other signal filtering techniques
because it tends to maintain signal features even while
minimizing noise and without a need for extra channels. In this
research efficiency of denoising uterine EMG signals, using
different wavelet functions and different levels of signal
decomposition were examined by finding the SNR values of
the denoised signals. Furthermore, a comparative study was

978-1-4673-6516-1/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE

realized to show the effectiveness of the wavelet denoising

method with a band-pass Butterworth filter.

II.

METHODOLOGY

The sample raw EMG signals were collected from

PhysioBank ATM. For this experiment, three separate uterine
EMG data files were used (three separate subjects). The
records were obtained from pregnant women during their
regular check-ups at the University Medical Centre Ljubljana,
Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The records were
collected from the abdominal surface using four AgCl2
electrodes and each record is 30 minutes in duration [14].
A. Wavelet denoising
The recorded uterine EMG signals were denoised using the
discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and a threshold method.
The DWT and threshold based denoising was implemented
with MATLAB Wavelet toolbox. Fig. 1, gives the flow of the
algorithm that is able to remove interference noise using the
wavelet based denoising process.
The wavelet based denoising process is described as follows:
Wavelet decomposition: The first step of wavelet
denoising procedure is decomposing the noisy signal using the
DWT. The DWT analyzes the signal at different frequency
bands with different resolutions by decomposing the signal
into approximations ak[n] and details dk[n] coefficients as
shown in Fig. 2. The decomposition of the signal into different
frequency bands is simply obtained by successive high-pass
and low-pass filtering of the discrete time domain signal. For
this research wavelet functions Daubechies (db2, db4, db5, db6
and db8), Symmlet (sym4, sym5) and orthogonal Meyer
(dmey) are used at two different levels of decomposition
(level3 and level4).

Fig. 1. Block diagram of wavelet based denoising process

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2015 International Conference on Advances in Biomedical Engineering (ICABME)

Since wavelet function db4 at three level of decomposition

shows better performance from the results, therefore, it is
considered for the uterine EMG signal denoising process.
A comparative study with a 4-pole digital Butterworth filter
will assess the filtering performance of our designed denoising
algorithm. The band-pass cut-off frequencies was 0.3-3 HZ.
The Fig. 3, illustrates the different denoised versions of the
noisy EMG (collected from the first subject) using wavelet
function db4 at three level of decomposition and the band-pass
Butterworth filter.

Fig. 2. Three levels of wavelets decomposition

Thresholding method: The resulting DWT detail

coefficients are thresholded by either shrinkage (soft) or crude
(hard). It is known that soft thresholding provides smoother
results in comparison with the hard thresholding technique [13,
15 and 16]. According to [17], hard thresholding method is
used when the both of the signal and the noise are random.
However, in our case EMG signal is smooth. Thus, the soft
strategy is used for this research.
Wavelet reconstruction: Finally, the original signal is
reconstructed from the thresholded DWT coefficients using the
inverse wavelet transform.
B. SNR calculation
The SNR is calculated by equation 1.
SNR=10 log10 (Ps/Pn)

(1)

where Ps is the average power of the denoised signal and Pn is

the average power of the noise.
According to equation (1), the higher the value of positive
SNR (dB), the better the performance of the wavelet function.

III.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In this experiment, the wavelet denoising method was

applied to the uterine EMG signals. Different wavelet
functions were examined to optimize denoising procedure
(db2, db4, db5, db6 and db8) including sym4, sym5 and dmey
with three and four levels of decomposition. The appropriate
wavelet function is chosen because of the calculated SNR
values. Table 1 gives the SNR values of the three subjects and
Table 2 gives the average SNR values of the subjects presented
in Table 1 for the third level of decomposition.
According to the results in Table 1, we conclude that at
three level of decomposition, the SNR is large, but after
increasing the number of levels, no improvement in SNR
values was obtained. As a result, the decomposition of the
uterine EMG signal up to third level is sufficient in obtaining
maximum SNR. According to Table 2, the wavelet functions
under test show similar kind of performance; however, the
Daubechies wavelet functions (especially db4) have higher
SNR values compared to the other wavelet families; Symmlet
and orthogonal Meyer. Other studies from the literature
demonstrated the superior performance of the Daubechies
wavelet function in the EMG signal filtering [15, 18].

From the obtained results of the comparative study, we

conclude that the band-pass Butterworth filter provides the
output SNR values of around 0 dB, however our proposed
algorithm based on wavelet denoising process provides the
output SNR values of around 7 dB which emphasizes the
higher performance of our designed algorithm for the noisy
uterine EMG signal.
The advantage of wavelet transform is possibility to
analyze non-stationary signals in both time and frequency
domain efficiently. However, denoising methods based on
Fourier transform fails as it gives a frequency spectrum where
the time information is lost [19]. Fourier transform supposes
the signal is stationary, but EMG signal is always nonstationary.
Comparing to the high-pass or digital filters [5, 6], wavelet
analysis performs denoising much better; wavelet transform
not only minimizes the noises of EMG signals but also highly
preserve the characteristics of original signals.
Adaptive filtering has also shown great results in denoising
EMG signals. This method has a major limitation; the need of
an extra channel to record a reference noise signal, which takes
more computational time for calculation [8, 9].
In recent studies, a novel method based on empirical mode
decomposition (EMD) showed effective results in biomedical
signal filtering [20, 21 and 22]. In future work we will test the
performance of the combination of the discrete wavelet
transform with the EMD technique in uterine EMG signal
denoising compared with each method alone.

IV. CONCLUSION
In present study, wavelet transform was successfully
applied to uterine EMG signals denoising. Different wavelet
functions were tested to optimize denoising procedure at three
and four level of decomposition. Results obtained through the
research clearly show that wavelet function db4 with three
level of decomposition can denoise uterine EMG signal most
effectively among the other wavelet functions. Moreover, the
comparative study based on the band-pass Butterworth filter
demonstrates the superior filtering performance of our
algorithm.

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2015 International Conference on Advances in Biomedical Engineering (ICABME)

TABLE I.

SNR values (in dB) of various wavelet function with three and
four level of decomposition

Wavelet

EMG1

EMG2

References

EMG3

Function

Level3

Level4

Level3

Level4

Level3

Level4

db2

11.98

4.81

5.03

-0.8

4.47

-2.67

db4

14.25

6.27

5.42

0.87

5.4

-1.15

db5

13.32

6.18

4.71

0.51

5.72

-1.39

db6

13.48

6.2

5.32

0.59

5.61

-1.44

db8

13.55

6.33

5.12

0.43

5.69

-1.21

sym4

13.35

5.85

4.66

0.14

5.53

-0.58

sym5

13.4

6.12

5.15

0.48

5.33

-0.72

dmey

13.36

6.42

4.28

0.6

5.21

-0.89

TABLE II. Average (from three subjects) SNR values (in dB) for three level
of decomposition
Wavelet
Function

db2

db4

db5

db6

db8

sym4

sym5

dmey

SNR( dB)

7.16

8.35

7.91

8.13

8.12

7.84

7.96

7.61

Fig. 3. The comparative analysis with the band-pass Butterworth filter; (a) :
the noisy EMG signal collected from the first subject; (b): the 3rd level db4
wavelet function denoising signal; (c): the band-pass Butterworth filtred signal

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