A Novel Brain Decoding Method: a Correlation Network Framework for Revealing Brain Connections

Brain decoding is a hot spot in cognitive science, which focuses on reconstructing perceptual images from brain activities. Analyzing the correlations of collected data from human brain activities and representing activity patterns are two problems in brain decoding based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals. However, existing correlation analysis methods mainly focus on the strength information of voxel, which reveals functional connectivity in the cerebral cortex. They tend to neglect the structural information that implies the intracortical or intrinsic connections; that is, structural connectivity. Hence, the effective connectivity inferred by these methods is relatively unilateral. Therefore, we proposed a correlation network (CorrNet) framework that could be flexibly combined with diverse pattern representation models. In the CorrNet framework, the topological correlation was introduced to reveal structural information. Rich correlations were obtained, which contributed to specifying the underlying effective connectivity. We also combined the CorrNet framework with a linear support vector machine (SVM) and a dynamic evolving spike neuron network (SNN) for pattern representation separately, thus providing a novel method for decoding cognitive activity patterns. Experimental results verified the reliability and robustness of our CorrNet framework and demonstrated that the new method achieved significant improvement in brain decoding over comparable methods.

Detecting Drivable Area for Self-driving Cars: An Unsupervised Approach

It has been well recognized that detecting drivable area is central to self-driving cars. Most of existing methods attempt to locate road surface by using lane line, thereby restricting to drivable area on which have a clear lane mark. This paper proposes an unsupervised approach for detecting drivable area utilizing both image data from a monocular camera and point cloud data from a 3D-LIDAR scanner. Our approach locates initial drivable areas based on a "direction ray map" obtained by image-LIDAR data fusion. Besides, a fusion of the feature level is also applied for more robust performance. Once the initial drivable areas are described by different features, the feature fusion problem is formulated as a Markov network and a belief propagation algorithm is developed to perform the model inference. Our approach is unsupervised and avoids common hypothesis, yet gets state-of-the-art results on ROAD-KITTI benchmark. Experiments show that our unsupervised approach is efficient and robust for detecting drivable area for self-driving cars.