# How to handle extremely 'long' images?

After transforming timeseries into an image format, I get a width-height ratio of ~135. Typical image CNN applications involve either square or reasonably-rectangular proportions - whereas mine look nearly like lines:

Example dimensions: (16000, 120, 16) = (width, height, channels).

Are 2D CNNs expected to work well with such aspect ratios? What hyperparameters are appropriate - namely, in Keras/TF terms, strides, kernel_size (is 'unequal' preferred, e.g. strides=(16, 1))? Relevant publications would help.

Clarification: width == timesteps. The images are obtained via a transform of the timeseries, e.g. Short-time Fourier Transform. channels are the original channels. height is the result of the transform, e.g. frequency information. The task is binary classification of EEG data (w/ sigmoid output).

• Are the spatial correlations in the vertical (height) dimension relevant? I.e. does the vertical distance have physical meaning? – MPA Apr 6 at 11:51
• @MPA Question updated – OverLordGoldDragon Apr 6 at 11:58
• What is the type of the desired output? A class label (e.g. for detection), a time series (e.g. for filtering), etc.? – MPA Apr 6 at 12:07
• @MPA Binary classification, updated again – OverLordGoldDragon Apr 6 at 12:09
• Depending on the physical nature of the input data, you could first perform 1D convolutions with dimensionality reduction along the time axis to extract the most relevant features for each frequency band, and then combine the features of each frequency band into a class prediction. Or if the data are sufficiently smooth, you could try an auto-encoder to compress the time axis into a smaller latent space representation, and perform additional analysis on the latent space. – MPA Apr 6 at 14:00

Apply a 2D convolution (or multiple such convolutions) of shape(1, k, c), such that the output of the convolutions becomes (16000, 1, c). So if you only use a single convolutional layer, k=120.