Scenic Beauty Estimation using Linear Discriminant Analysis

ABSTRACT
The main focus of this project is to estimate the scenic beauty of forest images using Linear Discriminant Analysis, a valuable tool for multigroup classification and data reduction. This project originated from the United States Forest Service (USFS) to determine the scenic beauty of forests to preserve recreation and aesthetic resources in forest management. The results of this project would be useful to determine a predefined pattern to cut the trees so as to retain the scenic beauty even after cutting the forest for timber. The algorithm will be initially developed and tested in Matlab and this algorithm would be developed in C++. The software developed will be tested on 638 images available in the database to determine their scenic quality.Every image will be rated on a scale of -200 to 200 and the results obtained will be compared with the ratings from the Scenic Beauty Estimation human subjective ratings through the use of histograms.

S.B Balakrishnama and R.M. Brown, Jr.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mississippi State University
email: balakris@cavs.msstate.edu, rmb6@ra.msstate.edu
URL: http://cavs.msstate.edu/research/isip/publications/courses/ece_4773/hse/ies/projects/group_scenic/presentation/