What makes a picture memorable?
Aude Oliva, Phillip Isola, Aditya Khosla, Wilma Alice Bainbridge · SPIE Newsroom · 2013
Computer vision techniques predict whether an image will be remembered or forgotten. ‘Mental sports ’ have become a new trend in self-improvement, with video games designed to improve mental fitness. At the World Memory Championships, athletes compete to recall massive amounts of information; contestants must memorize and recall sequences of abstract images and the names of people whose faces are shown in photographs. While these tasks might seem challenging, our research suggests that images that possess certain properties are memorable. Our findings can explain why we have all had some images stuck in our minds, but ignored or quickly forgotten others. Although image memorability seems subjective and hard to quantify, our recent work1–5 shows that it is not an inexplicable phenomenon. We found that visual memorability