A group arousal analysis based on the movement synchronization of audiences

Recent years have witnessed the rapid growth of performing arts in Korea as well as worldwide. Advances in performing arts technologies have allowed for a shift from one-way performances to interactive ones. The audience’s arousal is one of the most important features in interactive performances. An audience consists of a group of people responding collectively to a stimulus. Here arousal is a critical factor influencing audience satisfaction and can be measured based on the audience’s behavior. The total group arousal of an audience is formed by exchanging emotional effects with surroundings. In this regard, empirical approaches are not sufficient in comparison to various theoretical approaches to group arousal. Previous studies have generally evaluated group arousal by the sum of group members’ emotions recognized from their faces, gestures, or voice. However, it is not easy to apply real-time data from individuals to performing arts. In addition, it is difficult to set sensors for audiences to retrieve human data. In this regard, this paper proposes a method for empirically measuring group arousal based on the rapid movement synchronization of a given group. In the proposed method, the extent to which each member’s movement response is synchronized with differential images and histograms is measured first, and then group arousal is calculated by the degree of this synchronization. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through an experiment by setting a threshold for deciding whether there is a response to a stimulus. The experimental results for 15 groups indicate the accuracy of the proposed method to be 82 %.