Abstract: Atrial fibrillation is a common arrhythmia, and its diagnosis is interfered by many factors. In order to achieve applicability in diagnosis and improve the level of automatic analysis of atrial fibrillation to the level of experts, the automatic detection of atrial fibrillation is very important. This study proposes an automatic detection algorithm for atrial fibrillation based on BP neural network (back propagation network) and support vector machine (SVM). The electrocardiogram (ECG) segments in the MIT-BIH atrial fibrillation database are divided into 10, 32, 64, and 128 heartbeats, respectively, and the Lorentz value, Shannon entropy, K-S test value and exponential moving average value are calculated. These four characteristic parameters are used as the input of SVM and BP neural network for classification and testing, and the label given by experts in the MIT-BIH atrial fibrillation database is used as the reference output. Among them, the use of atrial fibrillation in the MIT-BIH database, the first 18 cases of data are used as the training set, and the last 7 cases of data are used as the test set. The results show that the accuracy rate of 92% is obtained in the classification of 10 heartbeats, and the accuracy rate of 98% is obtained in the latter three categories. The sensitivity and specificity are both above 97.7%, which has certain applicability. Further validation and improvement in clinical ECG data will be done in next study.