  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 paper 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).
