Reconstruction of perceived face images from brain activities based on multi-attribute constraints

Reconstruction of perceived faces from brain signals is a hot topic in brain decoding and an important application in the field of brain-computer interfaces. Existing methods do not fully consider the multiple facial attributes represented in face images, and their different activity patterns at multiple brain regions are often ignored, which causes the reconstruction performance very poor. In the current study, we propose an algorithmic framework that efficiently combines multiple face-selective brain regions for precise multi-attribute perceived face reconstruction. Our framework consists of three modules: a multi-task deep learning network (MTDLN), which is developed to simultaneously extract the multi-dimensional face features attributed to facial expression, identity and gender from one single face image, a set of linear regressions (LR), which is built to map the relationship between the multi-dimensional face features and the brain signals from multiple brain regions, and a multi-conditional generative adversarial network (mcGAN), which is used to generate the perceived face images constrained by the predicted multi-dimensional face features. We conduct extensive fMRI experiments to evaluate the reconstruction performance of our framework both subjectively and objectively. The results show that, compared with the traditional methods, our proposed framework better characterizes the multi-attribute face features in a face image, better predicts the face features from brain signals, and achieves better reconstruction performance of both seen and unseen face images in both visual effects and quantitative assessment. Moreover, besides the state-of-the-art intra-subject reconstruction performance, our proposed framework can also realize inter-subject face reconstruction to a certain extent.