  Virality of online content on social networking websites is an important but
esoteric phenomenon often studied in fields like marketing, psychology and data
mining. In this paper we study viral images from a computer vision perspective.
We introduce three new image datasets from Reddit, and define a virality score
using Reddit metadata. We train classifiers with state-of-the-art image
features to predict virality of individual images, relative virality in pairs
of images, and the dominant topic of a viral image. We also compare machine
performance to human performance on these tasks. We find that computers perform
poorly with low level features, and high level information is critical for
predicting virality. We encode semantic information through relative
attributes. We identify the 5 key visual attributes that correlate with
virality. We create an attribute-based characterization of images that can
predict relative virality with 68.10% accuracy (SVM+Deep Relative Attributes)
-- better than humans at 60.12%. Finally, we study how human prediction of
image virality varies with different `contexts' in which the images are viewed,
such as the influence of neighbouring images, images recently viewed, as well
as the image title or caption. This work is a first step in understanding the
complex but important phenomenon of image virality. Our datasets and
annotations will be made publicly available.
