Visual Evaluation of Park Landscape Based on SBE and Eye Tracking

Abstract

In the field of landscape visual aesthetic evaluation, the SBE (Scenic Beauty Estimation) method is the main way for researchers of the psychophysical school. It obtains evaluation results by having evaluators observe photographs and rate landscape objects using uniform evaluation criteria, and is currently recognized as one of the better methods for landscape evaluation. Meanwhile, eye-tracking technique is another experimental technique that has been applied to landscape evaluation by researchers in recent years with many results. In this study, we take photos of environmental spaces taken in Jinan city park in China as landscape aesthetic evaluation objects, and use SBE method and eye tracking analysis method to conduct experiments respectively. On the one hand, we explore the SBE value of various environmental spaces in Jinan city park, and on the other hand, we conduct eye tracking experiments for the same subject scenes and obtain data (AOI area ratio, Fixation count, Fixation and Saccade duration). The correlation between SBE values and eye-tracking data and the analysis of eye-tracking heat maps were then carried out to investigate the relationship between the subjective aesthetic evaluation and the objective eye-tracking data. The following conclusions were reached: SBE values were significantly and positively correlated with the main indicators of eye-tracking; Naturalness, Spatiality and Visual interest points were the three key factors in the visual evaluation of the park landscape.