Relative spatial features for image memorability

Abstract

Recent studies in image memorability showed that the memorability of an image is a measurable quantity and is closely correlated with semantic attributes. However, the intrinsic characteristics of memorability are not yet fully understood. It has been reported that in contrast to a popular belief unusualness or aesthetic beauty of the image may not be positively correlated with the image memorability. This counter-intuitive characteristic of memorability hinders a better understanding of image memorability and its applicability. In this paper, we investigate two new spatial features that are closely correlated with the image memorability yet intuitively explainable. We propose the Weighted Object Area (WOA) that jointly considers the location and size of objects and the Relative Area Rank (RAR) that captures the relative unusualness of the size of objects. We empirically demonstrate their useful correlation with the image memorability. Results show that both WOA and RAR can improve the memorability prediction. In addition, we provide evidence that the RAR can effectively capture object-centric unusualness of size.