MATLAB,Signal Processing

Question

Is it possible to convert a PDF to .mat file for processing in MATLAB? I have ECG signal in PDF format.I want to process it in MATLAB

Answer 1

Find a PDF renderer such as Ghostscript, and use it to render the signal into an image. Then use one of the various File Exchange contributions to "digitize" the image. Search for tag:digitize inside the File Exchange.

You might get lucky and all the needed coordinates might happen to appear in sequential text form inside the PDF, but most of the time when they appear at all they tend to appear in some messy order, and it would be common for them not to appear at all in text form.

Answer 2

In MATLAB, probably no.

I have used a Python module, which one I don't recall, but there are more than you can shake a stick at on PyPi with the obvious 'pdf' as the search, which can analyse, parse, extract etc data from pdf files.

If you know Python, go there. If you don't know Python, it's worth learning at least the basics, for the wealth of tools there are on PyPi.

BTW, once you get to use Python, you'll find that when you add Numpy and MatPlotLib, you get an environment every bit as powerful as MATLAB, but arrays start from 0, and 1D vectors are just that, you don't need to distinguish between row and column vectors unless you want to ;-)

Once you have the data in Python, it's trivial to look up the .mat file format and create the appropriate file, or just make txt or csv and import into MATLAB.

Answer 3

According to https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51840764_A_Review_on_Digital_ECG_Formats_and_the_Relationships_Between_Them

ECG has a wide range of possible output formats.

Actually the PDF format is quite new compared to DICOM or XML, that can be readily imported into MATLAB and then generate a .mat file.