Affective Experience Measurement in Outdoor Environment via Machine Visual Cognition

Outdoor environments with quality landscapes can benefit people’s physical and mental health. Real-time assessment on individuals’ environmental affective experience can improve the scientism in measuring the quality of outdoor environments. Existing measurement methods are often insufficient for the cases of a larger site area or sample size. The machine visual cognition of Artificial Intelligence can realize the recognition of facial expressions and the changes in video images, which supports high-precision and long-cycle measurements on individuals’ affective experience in outdoor environments. Taking an urban community square as the study site, this research simultaneously collects participants’ facial data from video images and their electrodermal activity data, wherein Convolutional Neural Network algorithm model is trained with a deep learning algorithm, i.e. codec–SVM optimized model, whose reliability is tested through an additional experiment. The research reveals that: 1) The accuracy rate of the main and additional experiments in measuring individuals’ affective experience is 82.01% and 65.08%, respectively; 2) The additional experiment verifies the application potential of the codec–SVM optimized model; And 3) the model works more effective for outdoor scenarios with varying usage behaviors and open views. Therefore, machine visual cognition can be used for emotion measurement in a larger site area or sample size and contributes to the effectiveness of landscape optimization efforts, especially as an instrumental tool to study the affective experience of the ones who have communication or reading disability. The findings also demonstrate the model’s great potential in building Smart Cities with refined public services.