The Interestingness of Images

We investigate human interest in photos. Based on our own and others' psychophysical experiments, we identify various cues for "interestingness", namely aesthetics, unusualness and general preferences. For the ranking of retrieved images, interestingness shows to be more appropriate than cues proposed earlier. Interestingness is correlated with what people believe they will remember. This is opposed to actual memorability, which is uncorrelated to both. We introduce a set of features computationally capturing the three main aspects of visual interestingness and build an interestingness predictor from them. Its performance is shown on three datasets with varying context, reflecting the prior knowledge of the viewers.