Understanding and Predicting Image Memorability at a Large Scale

Aditya Khosla, Akhil S. Raju, Antonio Torralba, Aude Oliva; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015, pp. 2390-2398

Progress in estimating visual memorability has been limited by the small scale and lack of variety of benchmark data. Here, we introduce a novel experimental procedure to objectively measure human memory, building the largest annotated image memorability dataset to date (with 60,000 labeled images from a diverse array of sources). Using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), we show that fine-tuned deep features outperform all other features by a large margin, reaching a rank correlation of 0.64, near human consistency (0.68). Analysis of the responses of the high-level CNN layers shows which objects and regions are positively, and negatively, correlated with memorability, allowing us to create memorability maps for each image and provide a concrete method to perform image memorability manipulation. This work demonstrates that one can now robustly estimate the memorability of images from many different classes, positioning memorability and deep memorability features as prime candidates to estimate the utility of information for cognitive systems.