  Electrocardiogram (ECG) is an authoritative source to diagnose and counter
critical cardiovascular syndromes such as arrhythmia and myocardial infarction
(MI). Current machine learning techniques either depend on manually extracted
features or large and complex deep learning networks which merely utilize the
1D ECG signal directly. Since intelligent multimodal fusion can perform at the
stateof-the-art level with an efficient deep network, therefore, in this paper,
we propose two computationally efficient multimodal fusion frameworks for ECG
heart beat classification called Multimodal Image Fusion (MIF) and Multimodal
Feature Fusion (MFF). At the input of these frameworks, we convert the raw ECG
data into three different images using Gramian Angular Field (GAF), Recurrence
Plot (RP) and Markov Transition Field (MTF). In MIF, we first perform image
fusion by combining three imaging modalities to create a single image modality
which serves as input to the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In MFF, we
extracted features from penultimate layer of CNNs and fused them to get unique
and interdependent information necessary for better performance of classifier.
These informational features are finally used to train a Support Vector Machine
(SVM) classifier for ECG heart-beat classification. We demonstrate the
superiority of the proposed fusion models by performing experiments on
PhysioNets MIT-BIH dataset for five distinct conditions of arrhythmias which
are consistent with the AAMI EC57 protocols and on PTB diagnostics dataset for
Myocardial Infarction (MI) classification. We achieved classification accuracy
of 99.7% and 99.2% on arrhythmia and MI classification, respectively.
