Background Most existing automated sleep staging methods rely on multimodal data, and scoring a specific epoch requires not only the current epoch but also a sequence of consecutive epochs that precede and follow the epoch. Objective We proposed and tested a convolutional neural network called SleepInceptionNet, which allows sleep classification of a single epoch using a single-channel electroencephalogram (EEG). Methods SleepInceptionNet is based on our systematic evaluation of the effects of different EEG preprocessing methods, EEG channels, and convolutional neural networks on automatic sleep staging performance. The evaluation was performed using polysomnography data of 883 participants (937,975 thirty-second epochs). Raw data of individual EEG channels (ie, frontal, central, and occipital) and 3 specific transformations of the data, including power spectral density, continuous wavelet transform, and short-time Fourier transform, were used separately as the inputs of the convolutional neural network models. To classify sleep stages, 7 sequential deep neural networks were tested for the 1D data (ie, raw EEG and power spectral density), and 16 image classifier convolutional neural networks were tested for the 2D data (ie, continuous wavelet transform and short-time Fourier transform time-frequency images). Results The best model, SleepInceptionNet, which uses time-frequency images developed by the continuous wavelet transform method from central single-channel EEG data as input to the InceptionV3 image classifier algorithm, achieved a Cohen κ agreement of 0.705 (SD 0.077) in reference to the gold standard polysomnography. Conclusions SleepInceptionNet may allow real-time automated sleep staging in free-living conditions using a single-channel EEG, which may be useful for on-demand intervention or treatment during specific sleep stages.