Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is an effective method to deal with nonlinear nonstationary data, but the lack of orthogonal decomposition theory and mode-mixing are the main problems that limit the application of EMD. In order to solve these two problems, we propose an improved method of EMD. The most important part of this improved method is to change the mean value by envelopes of signal in EMD to the mean value by the definite integral, which enables the mean value to be mathematically expressed strictly. Firstly, we prove that the signal is orthogonally decomposed by the improved method. Secondly, the Monte Carlo method of white noise is used to explain that the improved method can effectively alleviate mode-mixing. In addition, the improved method is adaptive and does not need any input parameters, and the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) generated from it is robust to sifting. We have carried out experiments on a series of artificial and real data, the results show that the improved method is the orthogonal decomposition method and can effectively alleviate mode-mixing, and it has better decomposition performance and physical meaning than EMD, ensemble EMD (EEMD), and complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN). In addition, the improved method is generally more time-consuming than EMD, but far less than EEMD and CEEMDAN.

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Electrocardiogram (ECG) diagnosis is based on the waveform, duration and amplitude of characteristic wave, which are required to have a high accuracy for ECG signal reconstruction. As an effective nonlinear signal processing method, empirical mode decomposition (EMD) has been widely used for diagnosing and reconstructing the ECG signal, but there are two problems arising here. One is the mode mixing, and the other is that the mode components used in reconstruction are identified by experience. Therefore, the method of reconstruction is not adaptive and universal, and reconstructed ECG signal loses accuracy. Firstly, we propose an improved EMD method, which is called integral mean mode decomposition (IMMD). The analysis of 5000 samples of Gaussian white noise shows that IMMD has better multi-resolution analysis ability than EMD, and it can effectively alleviate mode mixing consequently. Secondly, based on the inherent physical characteristics of ECG signal, cardiac cycle or heart rate (HR), it has practical physical significance to identify the mode components used in ECG signal reconstruction. The cardiac cycle feature acts as the intrinsic mode function (IMF) component through two modes. 1) For the low-order IMF that belongs to the ECG signal, the cardiac cycle feature acts as the amplitude modulation. The envelope of the IMF component has the characteristics of the cardiac cycle, and the frequency corresponding to the maximum amplitude in the spectrum of the envelope is equal to HR. 2) For the high-order IMF that belongs to the ECG signal, the cardiac cycle feature acts as frequency modulation. Those IMF components have the harmonic characteristics of periodic heartbeats, and the maximum amplitude in the spectrum corresponds to an integral multiple of HR (usually 1－3 times). The noise attributed to IMF component cannot show the above two cardiac cycle characteristics. Thus the proposed method is adaptive and universal. The 47 ECG signals with baseline drift and muscle artifact noise are tested. The results show that the proposed method is more effective than the variational mode decomposition (VMD), Haar wavelet with soft threshold, ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and EMD. Among the 47 correlation coefficients between reconstructed and original ECG signals, the proposed method has 31 better than VMD, 33 better than Haar wavelet, 42 better than EEMD and 45 better than EMD. The mean of 47 correlation coefficients from the proposed method is 0.8904, and the variance is 0.0071, which shows that the proposed method has good performance and stability.

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