We've all said this to someone before: "You look familiar. I've seen you from somewhere before". In actual fact, they probably didn't, and it turns out there's a science to this and it could make your face more memorable.

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory developed an algorithm to make photos of faces easier to recall. The algorithm will make slight tweaks to the size, shape and appearance of the face. With these small adjustments, people remember the adjusted photo of the person more often. All this, by using math!

In an experiment, they first built a database of over 2,000 random faces and assigned each of the photos a memorability score by showing Amazon Mechanical Turk workers hundreds of photos and asked them to flag faces they remember. Each of them received a memorability score, which the computer used to identify specific features in the photos. The result was finding mathematical differences in the shape and appearance of the face.

The researchers then took 500 photos and fed them through a program which created thousands of slightly modified copies. The more memorable versions were selected over the less memorable, and the algorithm got smarter by knowing what makes a face more memorable. It was repeated over and over again until the software had determined it reached an optimum level of memorability.



The enhanced photos were sent back to the Mechanical Turk workers and they found that the pictures were more memorable 75 percent of the time. That's some killer face tagging software waiting to be bought by someone for sure. Facebook?

[Gizmag]