A Multi-Class ECG Signal Classifier Using a Binarized Depthwise Separable CNN with the Merged Convolution–Pooling Method

Binarized convolutional neural networks (bCNNs) are favored for the design of low-storage, low-power cardiac arrhythmia classifiers owing to their high weight compression rate. However, multi-class classification of ECG signals based on bCNNs is challenging due to the accuracy loss introduced by the binarization operation. In this paper, an effective multi-classifier system is proposed for electrocardiogram (ECG) signals using a binarized depthwise separable convolutional neural network (bDSCNN) with the merged convolution–pooling (MCP) method. The binarized depthwise separable convolution layer is adopted to reduce the increased number of parameters in multi-classification systems. Instead of operating convolution and pooling sequentially as in a traditional convolutional neural network (CNN), the MCP method merges pooling together with convolution layers to reduce the number of computations. To further reduce hardware resources, this work employs blockwise incremental calculation to eliminate redundant storage with computations. In addition, the R peak interval data are integrated with P-QRS-T features to improve the classification accuracy. The proposed bDSCNN model is evaluated on an Intel DE1-SoC field-programmable gate array (FPGA), and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves a five-class classification accuracy of 96.61% and a macro-F1 score of 89.08%, along with a dynamic power dissipation of 20 μW for five-category ECG signal classification. The hardware resource usage of BRAM and LUTs plus REGs is reduced by at least 2.94 and 1.74 times, respectively, compared with existing ECG classifiers using bCNN methods.