Visual Impact Assessment for Infrastructure Design

The paper illustrates the verification of methodologies employed by international agencies to assess the Scenic Quality of a landscape. Several States determine a landscape’s visual quality using predictor variables. This research aims to validate the recognized ability of these predictor variables to reproduce untrained observers’ preferences. Three variables have been chosen to analyze a series of Italian landscapes: Vividness, Intactness and Unity. Photographic inventories were created for different landscapes. Pools of landscape architects judged the slides associated to each landscape using a 7-point scale. Identical slides were then shown to untrained observers composed of 201 students that used a 10-point scale to evaluate Scenic Beauty for each picture. Students’ judgments were then related to the expert judgments using a regression analysis. Road evaluation from the landscape will be a future application using simulation or rendering techniques.