  Always, some individuals in images are more important/attractive than others
in some events such as presentation, basketball game or speech. However, it is
challenging to find important people among all individuals in images 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 difficulty by constructing a multiple
Hyper-Interaction Graph to treat each individual in an image as a node and
inferring the most active node referring to interactions estimated by various
types of clews. We model pairwise interactions between persons as the edge
message communicated between nodes, resulting in a bidirectional
pairwise-interaction graph. To enrich the personperson interaction estimation,
we further introduce a unidirectional hyper-interaction graph that models the
consensus of interaction between a focal person and any person in a local
region around. Finally, we modify the PageRank algorithm to infer the
activeness of persons on the multiple Hybrid-Interaction Graph (HIG), the union
of the pairwise-interaction and hyperinteraction graphs, and we call our
algorithm the PersonRank. In order to provide publicable datasets for
evaluation, we have contributed 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.
