Leveraging Visual Blur Perception Characteristics for EEG Decoding

Abstract

In recent years, electroencephalography (EEG)-based visual decoding research has become a key direction for revealing brain processing mechanisms and realizing brain-computer interfaces. This emerging field has attracted extensive attention in the fields of brain science, cognitive neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Among various approaches, contrastive learning has demonstrated strong performance in aligning multi-modal data, effectively enabling unified representations across modalities. However, during human visual perception, images are often subject to varying degrees of blurring due to the uneven distribution of retinal photoreceptor cells and the limited speed of lens accommodation. To address the mismatch between EEG and visual representations, we propose a novel visual decoding framework inspired by human perceptual blurring. Specifically, multi-level Gaussian blurring is applied to the visual stimuli to simulate human visual characteristics, followed by a feature selection module to construct robust visual representations. For EEG decoding, we design a lightweight and efficient network employing positively constrained spatial convolutions to identify channels associated with visual processing. The EEG and visual features are then aligned using contrastive learning. We evaluate the proposed framework on the Things-EEG dataset. Experimental results show significant improvements in the zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval task, achieving a top-1 accuracy of 80% and a top-5 accuracy of 96.9%, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by margins of 29.1% and 17.2%, respectively. These findings highlight the potential of incorporating perceptual properties into EEG-based visual decoding.