Personrank: Detecting important people in images

Wei-Hong Li, Benchao Li, Wei-Shi Zheng

Abstract: Always, some individuals in images are more important/attractive than the others in some events such as presentation, basketball game or speech. However, it is chal- lenging to find important people among all individuals in an image directly based on their spatial or appearance information due to the existence of diverse variations of pose, action, appearance of persons and various changes of occasions. We overcome this challenge by constructing a multiple Hyper- Interaction Graph that treats each individual in an image as a node and inferring the most active node from the interactions estimated by using various types of cues. We model a pairwise interaction between people as an edge message communicated between nodes, resulting in a bidirectional pairwise-interaction graph. To enrich the person-person interaction estimation, we further introduce a unidirectional hyper-interaction graph that models the consensus of interactions between a focal person and any person in his/her local region around. Finally, we modify the PageRank algorithm to infer the activeness of people on the multiple Hybrid-Interaction Graph (HIG), the union of the pairwise-interaction and hyper-interaction graphs, and we call our algorithm the PersonRank. In order to provide publicable datasets for evaluation, we have con- tributed a new dataset called Multi-scene Important People Image Dataset and gathered a NCAA Basketball Image Dataset from sports game sequences. We have demonstrated that the proposed PersonRank outperforms related methods clearly and substantially. Our code and datasets are available at https://weihonglee.github.io/Projects/PersonRank.htm.