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Perception-to-Image: Reconstructing Natural Images from the Brain Activity of Visual Perception

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Abstract

The reappearance of human visual perception is a challenging topic in the field of brain decoding. Due to the complexity of visual stimuli and the constraints of fMRI data collection, the present decoding methods can only reconstruct the basic outline or provide similar figures/features of the perceived natural stimuli. To achieve a high-quality and high-resolution reconstruction of natural images from brain activity, this paper presents an end-to-end perception reconstruction model called the similarity-conditions generative adversarial network (SC-GAN), where visually perceptible images are reconstructed based on human visual cortex responses. The SC-GAN extracts the high-level semantic features of natural images and corresponding visual cortical responses and then introduces the semantic features as conditions of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to realize the perceptual reconstruction of visual images. The experimental results show that the semantic features extracted from SC-GAN play a key role in the reconstruction of natural images. The similarity between the presented and reconstructed images obtained by the SC-GAN is significantly higher than that obtained by a condition generative adversarial network (C-GAN). The model we proposed offers a potential perspective for decoding the brain activity of complex natural stimuli.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61773094, 61533006, U1808204, 31730039, 31671133 and 61876114), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2015CB351701), National Major Scientific Instruments and Equipment Development Project (ZDYZ2015-2) and Chinese Academy of Sciences Strategic Priority Research Program B grants (XDB32010300). The authors declared that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MOE Key Lab for Neuroinformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, People’s Republic of China

    Wei Huang, Hongmei Yan, Chong Wang, Jiyi Li, Zhan Shen & Huafu Chen

  2. State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Beijing MR Center for Brain Research, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Zhentao Zuo

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Zhentao Zuo

  4. Department of Medical Information Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China

    Jiang Zhang

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  1. Wei Huang
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  2. Hongmei Yan
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  3. Chong Wang
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  5. Zhentao Zuo
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  7. Zhan Shen
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  8. Huafu Chen
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Hongmei Yan, Zhentao Zuo or Huafu Chen.

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Associate Editor Xiaoxiang Zheng oversaw the review of this article.

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Huang, W., Yan, H., Wang, C. et al. Perception-to-Image: Reconstructing Natural Images from the Brain Activity of Visual Perception. Ann Biomed Eng 48, 2323–2332 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-020-02502-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-020-02502-3

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