Electrocardiogram display data capturing and digitization based on image processing techniques

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most widely used diagnostic tools for heart diseases nowadays. Nevertheless, the accurate ECG interpretation is essentially required in order to evaluate the valuable information inside the ECG signal. The conventional technique of visual analysis to inspect the ECG signals by doctors or physicians are not effective and time consuming. Therefore, an automatic system which involves digital signal integration and analysis is required. This paper presents the developed software for image capturing from ECG machine by using digital webcam camera and performing analysis on the captured ECG graph in display before sending through the internet network. The implementation of this project is using MATLAB mathematical software (version 7) as well as the signal and image processing toolbox. Test results show that this software able to extract information from ECG image or video based file and the system manage to determine heart rate of captured ECG accurately.