Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most prevalent cardiac arrhythmia and it is considered as one of the most important risk factor for death, stroke, hospitalization, and heart failure. It is possible to detect AF by analyzing electrocardiogram (ECG) of patients. To work on clean signals and reduce errors resulted from noise, we have used Butterworth filter. The short-term Fourier transform was used to analyze ECG segments to obtain ECG spectrogram images. Convolutional neural network (CNN) models have been proposed for improving automatic detection of AF. The number of convolutional layers varies in different CNN models, and as the model become deeper, more hyper parameters are added. So in this article, variable length genetic algorithm was used in order to optimize hyper parameters of CNN. The results of experiments that performed onthe MIT-BIH AF database showed that the proposed method achieved 100%, 98.90%, and 99.95% for the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy, respectively, so the proposed method outperforms the deep CNNs. Hence, the proposed method is an accurate and efficient method for detection of AF.