The aesthetic quality of forests in the U.S. is actively managed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service. To support this mission, several forest lands in the southern U.S. have been carefully photographed and analyzed for factors contributing to scenic content. In this paper we describe algorithms that we developed to automatically assess the scenic quality of imag...

The life satisfaction approach has recently emerged as a new technique in the suite of options available to non-market valuation practitioners. Employing data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), this paper examines the influence of scenic amenity on the life satisfaction of residents of South East Queensland (SEQ),...

This paper investigates residents' perceptions of scenic quality in the Cape Cod community of Dennis, Massachusetts during a period of significant landscape change. In the mid-1 970s, Chandler [Natural and Visual Resources, Dennis, Massachusetts. Dennis Conservation Commission and Planning Board, Dennis, MA, 19761 worked with a community group to evaluate the natural resources of their town, an...

recent literature attaches high importance to scenic evaluation of natural landscapes. scenic beauty evaluation techniques often use parameters derived from photographs or collected in situ data via field assessment and questionnaires. such techniques are relatively costly and time consuming. park managers and recreational planners require spatial tools and techniques that are fast, flexible an...

Visual summarization of landmarks is an interesting and non-trivial task with the availability of gigantic community-contributed resources. In this work, we investigate ways to generate representative and distinctive views of landmarks by automatically discovering the underlying Scenic Themes (e.g. sunny, night view, snow, foggy views, etc.) via a content-based analysis. The challenge is that t...

The relationship between scenic beauty grade and measured tree indicators was studied through evaluation of 427 photos of individual Pinus tabulaeformis trees by using the scenic beauty estimation (SBE) method. Thirteen indices to reflect trunk, crown and stem-to-canopy ratios of individual trees were evaluated by invited students. Results showed that students preferred large diameters at breas...

Design traveling route for tourist is a challenging problem. According to the actual scenic spots, the mathematical model of the traveling routes was established. In order to get the best attractions which we want to choose, the complex decisions are analyzed by method of analytic hierarchy process. And four relative important aspects of the objectives are compared including culture and history...

With Taiwan’s steep terrain and fracture geology, natural disasters are likely to occur after heavy rainfall. To reduce the effects of upstream sediment on human surroundings, check dams are an essential transverse structure for streams in watersheds. However, there is likely to be a detrimental visual impact on the landscape without consideration of the integration of dams with the environment...

Beautiful outdoor locations are protected by governments and have recently been shown to be associated with better health. But what makes an outdoor space beautiful? Does a beautiful outdoor location differ from an outdoor location that is simply natural? Here, we explore whether ratings of over 200 000 images of Great Britain from the online game Scenic-Or-Not, combined with hundreds of image ...

Scenic is a program that allows the user to graphically specify an event to be detected by the RFID Ecosystem in the Paul G. Allen Center at the University of Washington. The user drags icons representing people, places, items and “event primitives” [5]. In this paper we discuss how Scenic has been extended to (1) save and recall an event definition, (2) edit previously created events, and (3) ...