Movie synchronization by audio landmark matching

This paper addresses movie synchronization, i.e. synchronizing multiple versions of the same movie, with an objective of automatically transferring metadata available on a reference version to other ones. We first exploit audio tracks associated with two different versions and adapt an existing audio fingerprinting technique to find all temporal matching positions between them. We then propose additional steps to refine the match and eliminate outliers. The proposed approach can efficiently handle situations where temporal scene edits occur like scene addition, removal, and even the challenging scene re-ordering case. Experimental results over synthetic editorial data show the effectiveness of the proposed approach with respect to the state-of-the-art dynamic time warping (DTW) based solution.