Wavelet-based unsupervised learning method for electrocardiogram suppression in surface electromyograms

•Wavelets provide sparse time-frequency intensity images for electrocardiograms.•Non-negative matrix factorization can extract patterns in intensity images.•The robustness of the method is owed to a carefully designed initial guess.•We report a superior performance regarding three state-of-the-art methods.

We present a novel approach aimed at removing electrocardiogram (ECG) perturbation from single-channel surface electromyogram (EMG) recordings by means of unsupervised learning of wavelet-based intensity images. The general idea is to combine the suitability of certain wavelet decomposition bases which provide sparse electrocardiogram time-frequency representations, with the capacity of non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) for extracting patterns from images. In order to overcome convergence problems which often arise in NMF-related applications, we design a novel robust initialization strategy which ensures proper signal decomposition in a wide range of ECG contamination levels. Moreover, the method can be readily used because no a priori knowledge or parameter adjustment is needed. The proposed method was evaluated on real surface EMG signals against two state-of-the-art unsupervised learning algorithms and a singular spectrum analysis based method. The results, expressed in terms of high-to-low energy ratio, normalized median frequency, spectral power difference and normalized average rectified value, suggest that the proposed method enables better ECG–EMG separation quality than the reference methods.