Sparse Modeling of Heart Sounds and Murmurs based on Orthogonal Matching Pursuit

In this paper, we address the Heart Sound signal modeling problem. The approach taken is based on sparse and redundant representations on an overcomplete dictionary. We apply matching pursuit (MP) and orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) on two sets of normal and pathological phonocardiograms (PCGs). The dictionary includes classical Gabor wavelets or time-frequency atoms which are the product of a sinusoid and a Gaussian window function. The normalized root-mean-square error (NRMSE) was computed between the original and the reconstructed signals. The results show that the OMP method is very suitable to the transient and complex properties of the PCG’s, as it yielded excellent NRMSE’s around 1.61% for normal sounds and 5.19% for pathological murmurs.