Assessment Of Beauty Research Articles

Assessing facial beauty through proportion analysis by image processing and supervised learning

Perception of universal facial beauty has long been debated amongst psychologists and anthropologists. In this paper, we perform experiments to evaluate the extent of universal beauty by surveying a number of diverse human referees to grade a collection of female facial images. Results obtained show that there exists a strong central tendency in the human grades, thus exhibiting agreement on beauty assessment. We then trained an automated classifier using the average human grades as the ground truth and used it to classify an independent test set of facial images. The high accuracy achieved proves that this classifier can be used as a general, automated tool for objective classification of female facial beauty. Potential applications exist in the entertainment industry, cosmetic industry, virtual media, and plastic surgery.

Measures of the EU Agri-Environmental Protection Scheme (GAEPS) and their impacts on the visual acceptability of Finnish agricultural landscapes

As a member of the European Union, Finland has committed itself to creating an environmental policy for agriculture. The aims of this study were to evaluate visual impacts of the General Agri-Environmental Protection Scheme (GAEPS) and Supplementary Protection Scheme (SPS) and general attitudes towards some activities in those policies and furthermore to examine the suitability of the method of Alho et al. (2001) for the scenic beauty assessment. The study areas consisted of three original, untreated, and 15 modified rural landscapes representing a variety of different activities. The scenic beauty of the landscapes was evaluated through pairwise comparisons of the responses of 68 people. Furthermore, attitudes towards environmental values, water protection, buffer strips and subsidies to agriculture were obtained. The respondents found the maintained buffer strips more pleasing than unmaintained strips and considered that the quality of watercourses was increased by buffer strips along them. A suitable width for the buffer strip along main ditches, brooks and waterways was regarded, on average, to be wider than the current recommendations. Although the opinions of farmers were basically in line with the existing recommendations, farmers' opininons on the second and third most important effects of buffer strips, an increase in weeds and a decrease in cultivated land, clearly differed from those of the other respondents. Afforestation, lack of building maintenance and abandoned fields were considered to be the most important factors impacting rural landscapes. This study indicates that the Finnish Agri-Environmental Protection Schemes have had positive impacts on the visual quality of landscapes. Attitudes towards other impacts are contradictory. This study also showed the improvement of the Alho et al. (2001) method in these kinds of studies relative to other methods of pairwise comparisons.

Measures of the EU Agri-Environmental Protection Scheme (GAEPS) and their impacts on the visual acceptability of Finnish agricultural landscapes

As a member of the European Union, Finland has committed itself to creating an environmental policy for agriculture. The aims of this study were to evaluate visual impacts of the General Agri-Environmental Protection Scheme (GAEPS) and Supplementary Protection Scheme (SPS) and general attitudes towards some activities in those policies and furthermore to examine the suitability of the method of Alho et al. (2001) for the scenic beauty assessment. The study areas consisted of three original, untreated, and 15 modified rural landscapes representing a variety of different activities. The scenic beauty of the landscapes was evaluated through pairwise comparisons of the responses of 68 people. Furthermore, attitudes towards environmental values, water protection, buffer strips and subsidies to agriculture were obtained. The respondents found the maintained buffer strips more pleasing than unmaintained strips and considered that the quality of watercourses was increased by buffer strips along them. A suitable width for the buffer strip along main ditches, brooks and waterways was regarded, on average, to be wider than the current recommendations. Although the opinions of farmers were basically in line with the existing recommendations, farmers' opininons on the second and third most important effects of buffer strips, an increase in weeds and a decrease in cultivated land, clearly differed from those of the other respondents. Afforestation, lack of building maintenance and abandoned fields were considered to be the most important factors impacting rural landscapes. This study indicates that the Finnish Agri-Environmental Protection Schemes have had positive impacts on the visual quality of landscapes. Attitudes towards other impacts are contradictory. This study also showed the improvement of the Alho et al. (2001) method in these kinds of studies relative to other methods of pairwise comparisons.

Assessment of scenic beauty of the roadside vegetation in northern England

This paper presents the results of a questionnaire survey of the views of the road users about the scenic beauty of current roadside vegetation and their perceptions of roadside vegetation with improved scenic value. A majority (83%) of the 183 respondents described scenic quality of roadside vegetation as an important feature of roadside environment indicating awareness among the public about the landscape aspects of the roadside environment. The roadside vegetation was described by a majority of the respondents as unpleasant and drab. The respondents showed a positive attitude towards establishing a variety of vegetation types instead of a uniform seed mixture. Grass swards with flowering herbs near the road and trees further away was the most preferred combination of plant types for re-vegetation of road verges. They also showed a greater preference for the re-establishment of native species in the re-vegetation of roadside verges. However, they did not support higher expenditure on the improvement of scenic beauty of roadside vegetation that calls for introduction of cost-effective methods for re-vegetation and management of roadside verges.

CLASSIFICATION OF LANDSCAPES USING QUANTITATIVE AND CATEGORICAL DATA, AND PREDICTION OF THEIR SCENIC BEAUTY IN NORTH-WESTERN SPAIN

The present study approaches the environmental assessment of landscapes in two steps: first, through the determination of the relevant characteristics that influence the perception of a sample of galician landscapes, in north-western spain, using both quantitative data and categorical data; and second, by obtaining a list of predictors of scenic beauty for a sample of landscapes. Predictors were related to two of the most fertile approaches to landscape assessment: the psychophysical and cognitive paradigms, the latter including five different models to explain landscape preference. Our results support the existence of a classification criteria that is common to most subjects. The criteria followed by subjects to derive this classification were: presence/absence of water, artificiality of landscape, powerfulness of landscape, and human presence in the landscape. With respect to assessment of scenic beauty, our results showed that both the psychophysical and the cognitive paradigm were able to explain to a high degree the preference scores. The relationships found between predictors from both paradigms indicate that it would be possible to integrate them into a more general model of landscape assessment.

Validity of photo-based scenic beauty judgments

This study examines whether scenic beauty judgments based upon photographs of landscapes are similar to scenic beauty judgments based upon on-site experiences of landscapes. Two concerns are emphasized: (1) a concern about the threat to the ecological validity of photo-based assessments caused by differences between on-site and photo-based contexts and (2) a concern that the individual rater, rather than the group average, is the more appropriate unit of analysis for tests of validity of photo-based assessments. On-site scenic beauty assessments were collected from day hikers. These data were compared to photo-based scenic beauty assessments collected from the same persons three months and nine months after their on-site experience. Approximately 38% of participants had insignificant correlations between their on-site and photo-based scenic beauty ratings. These and other results suggest that the validity of photo-based scenic beauty assessments is in doubt, at least for the situation studied here. Moreover, the results suggest that the difference between persons' on-site and photo-based ratings can be explained, in part, by contextual factors such as the mood, meaning, and novelty that differentiate photo-based from on-site landscape experiences. Group averaged on-site and photo-based assessments, however, were very similar, suggesting caution may be in order for studies interpreting summary measures.

The Scenic Beauty Temporal Distribution Method: An Attempt to Make Scenic Beauty Assessments Compatible with Forest Planning Efforts

Abstract A method was developed which simulates and evaluates scenic beauty through time with the intent of providing useful information for forest management and planning efforts. It is argued that temporal based scenic information is essential given the dynamic nature of forest management and planning. Temporal distributions of scenic beauty, which represent the level of scenic beauty at each year during the planning horizon, were simulated in order to evaluate the scenic impacts of proposed management actions. Four general loblolly pine stand management practices (unthinned natural, unthinned planted, lightly thinned planted, and heavily thinned planted) were compared with respect to their impacts on scenic beauty. Overall, natural stands were of highest scenic quality followed by unthinned planted and heavily thinned planted stands, which were not significantly different from one another. The lightly thinned stands were least scenic. These findings are consistent with results of past research. Also examined were the scenic impacts of management actions such as rotation age and initial density. In general, decreasing stand density increases scenic beauty, less productive sites have more scenic beauty, and increasing stand age increases scenic beauty. Information about initial stand conditions was found highly predictive of how scenic beauty temporal distributions perform over a 50-year horizon. It was concluded that the scenic beauty temporal distribution method provides managerially relevant information and has the potential to be a useful forest management decision-making tool. Forest Sci. 32:271-286.

Sensitivity of scenic beauty assessments

Measurements representing the public evaluations of scenic beauty were compared using two psychophysical measurement techniques. It had been suggested that the easier-to-use Scenic Beauty Estimation procedure might not discriminate among similar scenes as well as the Law of Comparative Judgment procedure and thus be inapplicable to certain situations. However, this study suggests that the Scenic Beauty Estimation procedure can reliably discriminate among very similar forest landscape scenes, and thus seems appropriate for most landscape assessment studies.

On the possibility of quantifying scenic beauty — A response

This article is a rebuttal to A.A. Carlson's argument ( Landscape Plann., 4 (1977) 131–172) against the empirical assessment and quantification of scenic beauty. The rebuttal is focused upon several ways in which Carlson misconstrues the intentions and purposes of practical aesthetic landscape assessments. Principal among these is that empirical or quantitative methods are not a substitute for a consi qualities, but rather are instruments for more effectively exploring and substantiating relations among aesthetic qualities. These empirical methods of aesthetic assessment are directed not so much at the pursuit of objectivity alone, but rather the generation of evidence to support the relationships upon which aesthetic assessments are based. Such relations may legitimately involve particular aesthetic qualities, such as formal ones, when an appropriate and important generic quality, such as scenic beauty, is the object of the aesthetic assessments in question. Furthermore, it is also valid to test assessment methods with operational-criterion measures, such as public perceptions of landscapes, when such measures are relevant to the qualities and land management interests that the aesthetic assessments are meant to serve. The possibilities of employing empirical methods to develop and apply aesthetic assessments are not limited by the weaknesses of any particular method. and relationships which might be researched are tremendously varied, as are the approaches to such research. The testing and theoretical explanation of these relations should not tend to simplify landscape appreciation nor supplant natural aesthetic sensitivities, but should instead enhance our understanding of the ae landscapes. This understanding can then also enhance our awareness of how environmental aesthetics function in our lives, just as it provides the basis assessments with which to protect the aesthetic quality of the environment.