Estimating Visual Quality of Scenic Highway Using GIS and Landscape Visualizations

Abstract

With ever increasing use of highways for transportation in modern life, highway landscape has gradually become one of the major elements of the roadside environment that people experience on a frequent basis. The project has harnessed the power of GIS to investigate the relationship of landscape features including topography, landscape elements and visual closure with scenic preference. A number of experimental landscape visualizations, in the form of video clips, were statistically generated using GIS and Continuous rating data were then recorded for scenic preference. A procedure for measuring the scenic quality of the highway landscape and explaining how landscape features relate to the visual perceptions of drivers by collecting and analyzing the highway landscape visualizations are described in this paper, which would provide designers and decision-makers with a framework for incorporating multi-modal elements and their relationships into highway landscape planning and design.