A Survey of fMRI to Image Reconstruction
This survey organizes an emerging field for neuroscience and brain-computer interface researchers, but is incremental as a review paper.
This paper provides the first systematic review of fMRI-to-image reconstruction methods, identifying key challenges like data scarcity and cross-subject variability while categorizing approaches such as fMRI signal encoding and image generation.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) based image reconstruction plays a pivotal role in decoding human perception, with applications in neuroscience and brain-computer interfaces. While recent advancements in deep learning and large-scale datasets have driven progress, challenges such as data scarcity, cross-subject variability, and low semantic consistency persist. To address these issues, we introduce the concept of fMRI-to-Image Learning (fMRI2Image) and present the first systematic review in this field. This review highlights key challenges, categorizes methodologies such as fMRI signal encoding, feature mapping, and image generator. Finally, promising research directions are proposed to advance this emerging frontier, providing a reference for future studies.