MIT researchers develop algorithm to make your face more memorable

Imagine being able to adjust your face in a photo to make it look more striking and memorable before uploading it to Facebook or attaching it to a CV. These are just two suggested applications of an algorithm developed by researchers based at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

We're bombarded daily with new faces, which we evaluate instantaneously and automatically whenever we see them. Not only does that mean we make snap judgements about people's' personalities, but our brains decide almost instantly whether or not we are going to remember their faces.

The algorithm is described in a study, Modifying the Memorability of Face Photographs, which was presented at the ICCV in Sydney earlier this month, as being able to make subtle changes to faces so that they are more or less likely to stick in peoples' minds. Sometimes, as the paper points out, the changes are imperceptible, but they are enough to have an impact on whether the face gets remembered or forgotten.

The point of the algorithm is not to use it to airbrush photos of yourself to make yourself more attractive, but to make yourself more distinctive, so you're less likely to slip out of people's memories once they've met you or seen your photo. In fact, the whole point of the algorithm is that it manages to keep factors like your age, attractive and emotional magnitude stable, but modify only the memorability.
To work out the formula the team relied on previous work, which suggested all of us tend to remember and forget the same faces, suggesting that memorable faces could have certain factors in common. The study refers to other work that has found that caricatured faces that accentuate distinctive facial feature also help improve vulnerability, but because the authors needed to focus on "preserving face identity", they say, the algorithm "is likely to change the faces in more subtle ways than simply enlarging distinctive physical traits".
Primarily the algorithm was built based on scores from a visual memory game, although the researchers had to take into account there is a very high false hit rate, as people regularly think they recognise faces they have never seen before. Rather than memorable, these faces count as "familiar", and therefore the false hit rate was subtracted from the hit rate to be able to calculate the true hit rate.
The team tested the algorithm by showing people photos that had been manipulated to be either more memorable or forgettable, and then quizzed them to see which faces they remembered best. They algorithm achieved a success rate of 74 percent.
Memorable faces, the team discovered, tend to be more interesting, but do not necessarily all have one factor common -- such as age or distinctiveness -- in common. "Essentially, our data-driven approach is effectively able to identify the subtle elements of a face that affect its memorability and apply those effects to novel faces," the study says.

According to its abstract: "quantifying and modifying the 'memorability' of a face lends itself to many useful applications in computer vision and graphics, such as mnemonic aids for learning, photo editing applications for social networks and tools for designing memorable advertisements." It also suggests that it could be used by animators or makeup artists to draw more attention to certain characters. Most importantly though, the authors conclude, they have managed to prove that just like emotion, memorability can modify faces in minute and subtle ways, and yet change the reactions of others to it completely.