Understanding the Intrinsic Memorability of Images

“We find that images of enclosed spaces containing people with visible faces are memorable, while images of vistas and peaceful scenes are not. Contrary to popular belief, unusual or aesthetically pleasing scenes do not tend to be highly memorable.”

What makes an image memorable?

“When glancing at a magazine, or browsing the Internet, we are continuously being exposed to photographs. Despite this overflow of visual information, humans are extremely good at remembering thousands of pictures along with some of their visual details. But not all images are equal in memory. Some stitch to our minds, and other are forgotten.”

Test Your Own Images for Memorability Using La MeM

“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, allowing us to build LaMem, the largest annotated image memorability dataset to date (containing 60,000 images from diverse sources).”

Understanding and Predicting Image Memorability at a Large Scale
A. Khosla, A. S. Raju, A. Torralba and A. Oliva
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015
DOI 10.1109/ICCV.2015.275