2.2. Cancellation of Artifacts
The adaptive interference cancellation is a very efficient method to solve the problem when signals and interferences have overlapping spectra. This method has been used, among other applications, in external electroenterogram records [6] and in impedance cardiography [7]. Other applications in biomedical signals are, for example, removal of maternal ECG in fetal ECG records [8], detection of ventricular fibrillation and tachycardia [9], and cancellation of heart sound interference in tracheal sounds [10].
The basic adaptive noise canceller scheme is the same as that illustrated in Figure 2, where the primary signal is called “corrupted signal” and the secondary is called “reference signal”.
In this scheme, it is assumed that the corrupted signal d(n) is composed of the desired s(n) and noise n0(n), which is additive and not correlated with s(n). Likewise, the reference x(n) is uncorrelated with s(n) and correlated with n0(n). The reference x(n) feeds the filter to produce an output y(n) that is a close estimate of n0(n) [9].
To accomplish the objectives of this project, we arranged a cascade of three adaptive filters (Figure 3). The input d1(n) in the first stage is the EEG corrupted with artifacts (EEG + line-frequency + ECG + EOG). The reference x1(n) in the first stage is a sine function generated with 50 or 60 Hz, depending on the line type. Tests were carried out to determine the optimum values of L and μ. The order L of H1(z),