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Virginia Tech

VIP: Finding Important People in Images

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

People preserve memories of events such as birthdays, weddings, or vacations by capturing photos, often depicting groups of people. Invariably, some individuals in the image are more important than others given the context of the event. This work analyzes the concept of the importance of individuals in group photographs. We address two specific questions - Given an image, who are the most important individuals in it? Given multiple images of a person, which image depicts the person in the most important role? We introduce a measure of importance of people in images and investigate the correlation between importance and visual saliency. We find that not only can we automatically predict the importance of people from purely visual cues, incorporating this predicted importance results in significant improvement in applications such as im2text (generating sentences that describe images of groups of people).

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Science
Level thesis:degree_level
masters
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Engineering
Department dc:contributor.department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2015

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Mathialagan, Clint Solomon
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Batra, Dhruv
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Abbott, A. Lynn
  • Parikh, Devi

Subjects

dc:subject × 3

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:5709
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/53706

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Mathialagan, Clint Solomon. VIP: Finding Important People in Images. masters thesis, Virginia Tech, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/53706