Spectators' Synchronization Detection based on Manifold Representation of Physiological Signals: Application to Movie Highlights Detection

Detection of highlights in movies is a challenge for the affective understanding and implicit tagging of films. Under the hypothesis that synchronization of the reaction of spectators indicates such highlights, we define a synchronization measure between spectators that is capable of extracting movie highlights. The intuitive idea of our approach is to define (a) a parameterization of one spectator's physiological data on a manifold; (b) the synchronization measure between spectators as the Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance between local shape distributions of the underlying manifolds. We evaluate our approach using data collected in an experiment where the electro-dermal activity of spectators was recorded during the entire projection of a movie in a cinema. We compare our methodology with baseline synchronization measures, such as correlation, Spearman's rank correlation, mutual information, Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance. Results indicate that the proposed approach allows to accurately distinguish highlight from non-highlight scenes.