Is Your Image a Good Storyteller?

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first dataset and method for automatically assessing the semantic richness of images, which is crucial for storytelling, cognitive assessment, and AI development.

Contribution

It presents the novel ISA dataset and a language-based approach to evaluate image semantic complexity, addressing a previously overlooked aspect.

Findings

Our method effectively predicts semantic richness of images.

Semantic assessment correlates with storytelling and cognitive utility.

The dataset enables further research in image semantics.

Abstract

Quantifying image complexity at the entity level is straightforward, but the assessment of semantic complexity has been largely overlooked. In fact, there are differences in semantic complexity across images. Images with richer semantics can tell vivid and engaging stories and offer a wide range of application scenarios. For example, the Cookie Theft picture is such a kind of image and is widely used to assess human language and cognitive abilities due to its higher semantic complexity. Additionally, semantically rich images can benefit the development of vision models, as images with limited semantics are becoming less challenging for them. However, such images are scarce, highlighting the need for a greater number of them. For instance, there is a need for more images like Cookie Theft to cater to people from different cultural backgrounds and eras. Assessing semantic complexity requires human experts and empirical evidence. Automatic evaluation of how semantically rich an image will be the first step of mining or generating more images with rich semantics, and benefit human cognitive assessment, Artificial Intelligence, and various other applications. In response, we propose the Image Semantic Assessment (ISA) task to address this problem. We introduce the first ISA dataset and a novel method that leverages language to solve this vision problem. Experiments on our dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.