Decoding Generic Visual Representations From Human Brain Activity using Machine Learning

Among the most impressive recent applications of neural decoding is the visual representation decoding, where the category of an object that a subject either sees or imagines is inferred by observing his/her brain activity. Even though there is an increasing interest in the aforementioned visual representation decoding task, there is no extensive study of the effect of using different machine learning models on the decoding accuracy. In this paper we provide an extensive evaluation of several machine learning models, along with different similarity metrics, for the aforementioned task, drawing many interesting conclusions. That way, this paper a) paves the way for developing more advanced and accurate methods and b) provides an extensive and easily reproducible baseline for the aforementioned decoding task.Comment: Accepted at 1st Workshop on Brain-Driven Computer Vision - ECCV 201

Category decoding of visual stimuli from human brain activity using a bidirectional recurrent neural network to simulate bidirectional information flows in human visual cortices

Recently, visual encoding and decoding based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have realized many achievements with the rapid development of deep network computation. Despite the hierarchically similar representations of deep network and human vision, visual information flows from primary visual cortices to high visual cortices and vice versa based on the bottom-up and top-down manners, respectively. Inspired by the bidirectional information flows, we proposed a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN)-based method to decode the categories from fMRI data. The forward and backward directions in the BRNN module characterized the bottom-up and top-down manners, respectively. The proposed method regarded the selected voxels of each visual cortex region (V1, V2, V3, V4, and LO) as one node in the sequence fed into the BRNN module and combined the output of the BRNN module to decode the categories with the subsequent fully connected layer. This new method allows the efficient utilization of hierarchical information representations and bidirectional information flows in human visual cortices. Experiment results demonstrated that our method improved the accuracy of three-level category decoding than other methods, which implicitly validated the hierarchical and bidirectional human visual representations. Comparative analysis revealed that the category representations of human visual cortices were hierarchical, distributed, complementary, and correlative.Comment: submitted to the Frontiers in neuroscienc