Denoising and characterization of heart sound signals using optimal intrinsic mode functions

Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) allows decomposing an observed multicomponent signal into a set of monocomponent signals, called Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs). The aim of this paper is to characterize some heart sound (HS) signals embedded in noise using the EMD approach. In particular, the proposed technique automatically selects the most appropriate IMFs achieving the denoising based on EMD and Euclidean measure. Synthetic and real-life signals are used in the various examples to validate, and demonstrate the effectiveness, of the proposed method. Furthermore, this technique is compared to the commonly known approach based on the noise model.