Synchronization among Groups of Spectators for Highlight Detection in Movies

Detection of emotional and aesthetic highlights is a challenge for the affective understanding of movies. Our assumption is that synchronized spectators' physiological and behavioral reactions occur during these highlights. We propose to employ the periodicity score to capture synchronization among groups of spectators' signals. To uncover the periodicity score's capabilities, we compare it with baseline synchronization measures, such as the nonlinear interdependence and the windowed mutual information. The results show that the periodicity score and the pairwise synchronization measures are able to capture different properties of spectators' synchronization, and they indicate the presence of some types of emotional and aesthetic highlights in a movie based on spectators' electro-dermal and acceleration signals.