Denoising the ECG from the EMG Using Stationary Wavelet Transform and Template Matching

Wearable systems are increasingly adopted for health monitoring and wellness promotion. Among the most relevant biosignals, the electrocardiogram (ECG) plays a key role; however, in wearable settings (e.g., during physical activity), it is often corrupted by electromyogram (EMG) interference. This study presents a novel adaptive algorithm, template masking (TM), which integrates the stationary wavelet transform (SWT) with template matching for denoising the ECG from EMG. The method identifies the optimal wavelet and decomposition level to maximise detail sparsity. To mitigate EMG interference, after alignment in the SWT domain with a template, the detail coefficients are multiplied by a binary mask and smoothed. TM was compared with soft and hard thresholding on (1) simulations combining clinical ECGs (MIT-BIH database) and synthetic EMGs with different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), and (2) experimental signals including ECGs acquired with dry electrodes corrupted by EMGs (SimEMG database, also varying SNRs), as a potential wearable scenario. In both cases, TM yielded significantly lower reconstruction errors at SNRs below 5 dB (p<0.01) and significantly outperformed thresholding in the sensitivity of R-peaks estimation (p<0.001). These results demonstrate the potential of TM, highlighting the value of adaptive denoising algorithms.