Natural Image Reconstruction from fMRI using Deep Learning: A Survey
This is an incremental survey that synthesizes existing research for researchers in brain decoding and computational neuroscience.
The paper surveys recent deep learning methods for reconstructing natural images from fMRI data, evaluating their architectures, datasets, and metrics to provide a standardized performance assessment.
With the advent of brain imaging techniques and machine learning tools, much effort has been devoted to building computational models to capture the encoding of visual information in the human brain. One of the most challenging brain decoding tasks is the accurate reconstruction of the perceived natural images from brain activities measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this work, we survey the most recent deep learning methods for natural image reconstruction from fMRI. We examine these methods in terms of architectural design, benchmark datasets, and evaluation metrics and present a fair performance evaluation across standardized evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limitations of existing studies and present potential future directions.