The Relation between Green Visual Index and Visual Comfort in Qingdao Coastal Streets

Abstract

The public’s mental health is obviously impacted by the perception of green quantity in urban streets. As one of the important urban spatial indicators, the Green View Index (GVI) reflects the green quantity of streets, which is helpful in revealing the level of street vegetation from the perspective of pedestrians. The GVI can improve the attraction and the visual experience in urban streets. Taking Qingdao Coastal Streets as an example, the study used OpenStreetMap, Baidu Street View (BSV) image, DeepLabV3+ semantic segmentation, and the SD method to obtain the GVI and Visual Comfort (VICO), and the correlation and influence mechanisms were discussed. The result showed that the greening landscape of the overall Qingdao Coastal Streets was of high quality, and the historic district was the most outstanding. The greening quality was a little low in the transitional district and the western modern district, which should be improved. In addition, the relationship between GVI and VICO showed a strong positive correlation. The spatial distribution of the VICO was more consistent with the GVI. The street VICO was affected by the GVI, plant richness, the street scale, and landscape diversity. Moreover, with the increase of the GVI, the increase trend of the VICO instead gradually decreased. The contribution of this study was not only accurately diagnosing the problems of street greening quality, shedding light on the relationship between GVI and VICO, but also providing theoretical support for urban greening planning and management, especially for healthy street design.

Assessing Distributional and Perceived Equity of Urban Green Spaces in Qingdao’s Historic Urban Area

“…With the development of deep learning techniques and the availability of street view data, the GVI offers a potential solution for measuring the eye-level perception of greenness. Most of the results from previous studies support the association between urban greenery (using GVI as an indicator) and human environmental and visual perceptions [48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]. Therefore, the perceived equity of UGS is assessed based on GVI and location quotient.…”

“…An analysis between urban greenery and human visual perceptions has been conducted using GVI [51][52][53]. It has been proven by many scholars that streets with a GVI greater than 25% will generate positive visual perceptions of greenery [46,54,55]. In conclusion, unlike distributional equity, the evaluation of GVI has enabled assessments of green equity from a visual and perceived perspective.…”

Measuring human perception of residential built environment through street view image and deep learning

“…Semantic segmentation can identify the proportion of landscape elements such as buildings, sky, plants, person, and roads in urban street panorama images (Sun et al 2023). It provided accurate data for urban studies.…”

What does a tourist see, or, an environmental-aesthetic evaluation of a street view in Szeged (Hungary)

“…Many studies deal with the quality and direct impact of urban green spaces, the parameterization of the visual evaluation and perception of space (Chen et al, 2019;Qiao et al, 2021;Sun et al, 2023), with the visual complexity levels of streets and the perceived safety and comfort of users (Kawshalya et al, 2022), or with multivariate modelling of the street space based on computer analytics (Wang et al, 2023). The more intensive use of pedestrian streets by both local residents and tourists is indisputable.…”