# Progress Towards Decoding Visual Imagery via fNIRS

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07662 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07662/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Reconstructing the Mind's Eye: fMRI-to-Image with Contrastive Learning and Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18274/) (2023)
- [Seeing Beyond the Brain: Conditional Diffusion Model with Sparse Masked Modeling for Vision Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06956/) (2022)
- [MindEye2: Shared-Subject Models Enable fMRI-To-Image With 1 Hour of Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11207/) (2024)
- [SwiFT: Swin 4D fMRI Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05916/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Neural-Driven Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05397/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We demonstrate the possibility of reconstructing images from fNIRS brain activity and start building a prototype to match the required specs. By training an image reconstruction model on downsampled fMRI data, we discovered that cm-scale spatial resolution is sufficient for image generation. We obtained 71% retrieval accuracy with 1-cm resolution, compared to 93% on the full-resolution fMRI, and 20% with 2-cm resolution. With simulations and high-density tomography, we found that time-domain fNIRS can achieve 1-cm resolution, compared to 2-cm resolution for continuous-wave fNIRS. Lastly, we share designs for a prototype time-domain fNIRS device, consisting of a laser driver, a single photon detector, and a time-to-digital converter system.