scholarly journals The Accuracy Validation of FireFACE Software in Analyzing Facial Expressions of Urban Forest Visitors

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongxu Wei ◽  
Ping Liu
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expression ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Urban Forests ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
Shenyang City ◽  
Validation Test ◽  
Tree Population ◽  
The Difference

The construction of sustainable urban forests follows the principle that well-being in people is promoted when exposed to tree population. Facial expression is the direct representation of inner emotion that can be used to assess real-time perception in urban forests. The emergence and change of facial expressions for forest visitors are in an implicit process. The reserved character of oriental races strengthens the requirement for the accuracy to recognize expressions through instrument rating. In this study, a dataset was established with 2,886 randomly photographed faces from visitors in a constructed urban forest park and a promenade at summertime in Shenyang City at Northeast China. Six experts were invited to choose 160 photos in total with 20 images representing one of eight typical expressions as angry, contempt, disgusted, happy, neutral, sad, scared, and surprised emotions. The FireFACE ver. 3.0 software was used to test hit-ratio validation as the accuracy (ac.) to match machine-recognized photos with those identified by experts. According to Kruskal-Wallis test on the difference from averaged scores in 20 recently published papers, contempt (ac.=0.40%, P=0.0038) and scared (ac.=25.23%, P=0.0018) expressions cannot pass the validation test. Therefore, the FireFACE can be used as an instrument to analyze facial expression from oriental people in urban forests but contempt and scared expressions cannot be identified.

scholarly journals Facial expressions of Asian people exposed to constructed urban forests: Accuracy validation and variation assessment

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. e0253141
Author(s):  
Haoming Guan ◽  
Hongxu Wei ◽  
Richard J. Hauer ◽  
Ping Liu
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Urban Forests ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
Accuracy Measurement ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Variation Assessment ◽  
Asian People

An outcome of building sustainable urban forests is that people’s well-being is improved when they are exposed to trees. Facial expressions directly represents one’s inner emotions, and can be used to assess real-time perception. The emergence and change in the facial expressions of forest visitors are an implicit process. As such, the reserved character of Asians requires an instrument rating to accurately recognize expressions. In this study, a dataset was established with 2,886 randomly photographed faces from visitors at a constructed urban forest park and at a promenade during summertime in Shenyang City, Northeast China. Six experts were invited to choose 160 photos in total with 20 images representing one of eight typical expressions: angry, contempt, disgusted, happy, neutral, sad, scared, and surprised. The FireFACE ver. 3.0 software was used to test hit-ratio validation as an accuracy measurement (ac.) to match machine-recognized photos with those identified by experts. According to the Kruskal-Wallis test on the difference from averaged scores in 20 recently published papers, contempt (ac. = 0.40%, P = 0.0038) and scared (ac. = 25.23%, P = 0.0018) expressions do not pass the validation test. Both happy and sad expression scores were higher in forests than in promenades, but there were no difference in net positive response (happy minus sad) between locations. Men had a higher happy score but lower disgusted score in forests than in promenades. Men also had a higher angry score in forests. We conclude that FireFACE can be used for analyzing facial expressions in Asian people within urban forests. Women are encouraged to visit urban forests rather than promenades to elicit more positive emotions.

scholarly journals Visitors’ emotional expression in urban forest parks: What can we know about on-line facial images from the Social Networking Services?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haoming Guan ◽  
Honxu Wei ◽  
Xingyuan He ◽  
Zhibin Ren ◽  
Xin Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Urban Forests ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Social Networking Services ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
The Social ◽  
Forest Parks ◽  
Facial Images

Urban forests can attract visitors by the function of well-being improvement, which can be evaluated by analyzing the big-data from the social networking services (SNS). In this study, 935 facial images of visitors to nine urban forest parks were screened and downloaded from check-in records in the SNS platform of Sina Micro-Blog at cities of Changchun, Harbin, and Shenyang in Northeast China. Images were recognized for facial expressions by FaceReaderTM to read out eight emotional expressions: neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted, and contempt. The number of images by women was larger than that by men. Compared to images from Changchun, those from Shenyang harbored higher neutral degree, which showed a positive relationship with the distance of forest park from downtown. In Changchun, the angry, surprised, and disgusted degrees decreased with the increase of distance of forest park from downtown, while the happy and disgusted degrees showed the same trend in Shenyang. In forest parks at city center and remote-rural areas, the neutral degree was positively correlated with the angry, surprised and contempt degrees but negatively correlated with the happy and disgusted degrees. In the sub-urban area the correlation of neutral with both surprised and disgusted degrees disappeared. Our study can be referred to by urban planning to evaluate the perceived well-being in urban forests through analyzing facial expressions of images from SNS.

scholarly journals Visitors’ emotional expression in urban forest parks: What can we know about on-line facial images from the Social Networking Services?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haoming Guan ◽  
Honxu Wei ◽  
Xingyuan He ◽  
Zhibin Ren ◽  
Xin Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Urban Forests ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Social Networking Services ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
The Social ◽  
Forest Parks ◽  
Facial Images

Urban forests can attract visitors by the function of well-being improvement, which can be evaluated by analyzing the big-data from the social networking services (SNS). In this study, 935 facial images of visitors to nine urban forest parks were screened and downloaded from check-in records in the SNS platform of Sina Micro-Blog at cities of Changchun, Harbin, and Shenyang in Northeast China. Images were recognized for facial expressions by FaceReaderTM to read out eight emotional expressions: neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted, and contempt. The number of images by women was larger than that by men. Compared to images from Changchun, those from Shenyang harbored higher neutral degree, which showed a positive relationship with the distance of forest park from downtown. In Changchun, the angry, surprised, and disgusted degrees decreased with the increase of distance of forest park from downtown, while the happy and disgusted degrees showed the same trend in Shenyang. In forest parks at city center and remote-rural areas, the neutral degree was positively correlated with the angry, surprised and contempt degrees but negatively correlated with the happy and disgusted degrees. In the sub-urban area the correlation of neutral with both surprised and disgusted degrees disappeared. Our study can be referred to by urban planning to evaluate the perceived well-being in urban forests through analyzing facial expressions of images from SNS.

scholarly journals Assessing the Ecological Value of an Urban Forest Park: A Case Study of Sinhua Forest Park in Taiwan

Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 806
Author(s):  
Wan-Yu Liu ◽  
Yo-Zheng Lin ◽  
Chi-Ming Hsieh
Keyword(s):  
Urban Forest ◽  
Contingent Valuation Method ◽  
Urban Forests ◽  
Green Spaces ◽  
Socioeconomic Background ◽  
Tobit Regression ◽  
Ecological Value ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
Study Results ◽  
Ecological Conservation

Urban forests offer multiple functions: they can balance negative effects from the environment and provide the public with a place for leisure and recreation. Hence, urban forests are crucial to urban ecology and have been widely studied. In addition, relevant study results were applied for policymaking in urban development and forest park management. This study evaluated the ecological value of the Sinhua Forest Park and examined whether the socioeconomic background of participants influences their willingness to pay (WTP) for ecological conservation. Questionnaires were distributed to visitors in the Sinhua Forest Park in Tainan, Taiwan, and the payment card format of the contingent valuation method was employed to evaluate the ecological value. The results showed that the visitors had an annual WTP of $22.01 per person. However, when samples with protest responses were excluded, the WTP rose to $24.58. By considering the total number of visitors of a year, the total ecological value was $1,426,964.14/year and reached $1,593,257.31/year after excluding the protest samples. This study also analyzed participants’ within-variable socioeconomic background (e.g., gender and education) and discovered that male participants who are aged 60 years or older, with an education level of senior/vocational high school, and those who visited green spaces two to three times per week presented a high WTP score on average. A Tobit regression model was employed for examination, and the results indicated that participants’ education and frequency of visiting green spaces significantly influenced their WTP for the ecological conservation of the Sinhua Forest Park.

scholarly journals Seeing Mixed Emotions: The Specificity of Emotion Perception From Static and Dynamic Facial Expressions Across Cultures

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xia Fang ◽  
Disa A. Sauter ◽  
Gerben A. Van Kleef
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expression ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Emotion Perception ◽  
Morphological Similarity ◽  
Mixed Emotions ◽  
Dynamic Facial Expressions ◽  
The Difference

Although perceivers often agree about the primary emotion that is conveyed by a particular expression, observers may concurrently perceive several additional emotions from a given facial expression. In the present research, we compared the perception of two types of nonintended emotions in Chinese and Dutch observers viewing facial expressions: emotions which were morphologically similar to the intended emotion and emotions which were morphologically dissimilar to the intended emotion. Findings were consistent across two studies and showed that (a) morphologically similar emotions were endorsed to a greater extent than dissimilar emotions and (b) Chinese observers endorsed nonintended emotions more than did Dutch observers. Furthermore, the difference between Chinese and Dutch observers was more pronounced for the endorsement of morphologically similar emotions than of dissimilar emotions. We also obtained consistent evidence that Dutch observers endorsed nonintended emotions that were congruent with the preceding expressions to a greater degree. These findings suggest that culture and morphological similarity both influence the extent to which perceivers see several emotions in a facial expression.

scholarly journals PROBLEMS OF DEFINING A LEGAL STATUS OF URBAN FORESTS IN RUSSIA

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-197
Author(s):  
O. A. Lavrischeva
Keyword(s):  
Russian Federation ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Urban Forests ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
Territorial Planning ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Constitutional Right ◽  
Forest Parks

The paper considers norms of the Russian legislation on urban forests. The main problems of the legal regulation of urban forests within the Russian Federation have been identified and analyzed. The author pays special attention to the absence of a definition of the "urban forests" concept and the criteria for referring forest plantations to urban forests that make it possible to delineate urban forests from other plantations within the settlements, including forest parks. The author points to the fact that there is no criteria for power delineation to protect and use urban forests as well as a clear functional structure of urban forest management at the level of the subjects of the Russian Federation. There is also legal uncertainty about referring forest located in settlements that are not cities to forests. All these gaps in the Russian legislation cause certain difficulties in law enforcement practice. Based on the analysis, the author suggests ways of managing urban forests in the current socio-economic situation in Russia. First of all, it is necessary to introduce a number of clarifications at the legislative level: to regulate the legal regime for using urban forests established for forest park areas in accordance with the requirements of the Russian Federation Code, to establish the norm which will oblige local authorities while preparing and approving the documents concerning territorial planning, to include land plots on which urban forests are located, into recreational areas or zones of specially protected areas. The author believes that these changes in the forest legislation will help to develop and preserve urban forests as a reliable environmental and legal guarantee for the constitutional right of citizens to have a favorable environment.

scholarly journals Controlling Spread of the Oak Wilt Pathogen (Ceratocystis fagacearum) in a Minnesota Urban Forest Park Reserve

2010 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 171-178
Author(s):  
Jennifer Juzwik ◽  
Joseph O’Brien ◽  
Charles Evenson ◽  
Paul Castillo ◽  
Graham Mahal
Keyword(s):  
Urban Forest ◽  
Control Program ◽  
Geographical Information ◽  
Oak Wilt ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
Red Oaks ◽  
Treatment Models ◽  
The Difference ◽  
High Level ◽  
Root Treatment

Effectiveness of oak wilt control actions taken between 1997 and 1999 were evaluated for an urban forest park reserve in Minnesota, U.S. A high level of success (84% of evaluated disease centers) was achieved in controlling belowground spread of the vascular pathogen for four to six years by mechanically disrupting inter-tree root connections with the blade of a cable plow (vibratory plow, VP). Placements of the outermost (i.e., primary) VP treatment lines were based on a modified, rule-of-thumb model. Plausible scenarios based on two protocols for preventing pathogen spore production, and thus aboveground insect-mediated spread, were explored in conjunction with alternative, root treatment models using a geographical information system. For the 95% confidence level of a statistical model, the numbers of red oaks inside primary lines were 2.5 times greater than those inside the primary, installed lines and represents the difference in tree losses if all red oaks were removed to the primary lines [i.e., a “cut-to-the-line” (CTL) protocol]. Alternatively, a “monitor and remove” (MR) option (i.e., annual removal of wilting red oaks), would have resulted in 64% fewer removals than CTL. The park’s forestry division subsequently added the MR protocol to its oak wilt control program.

scholarly journals Facial Expressions of Visitors in Forests along the Urbanization Gradient: What Can We Learn from Selfies on Social Networking Services?

Forests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 1049 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongxu Wei ◽  
Richard J. Hauer ◽  
Xin Chen ◽  
Xingyuan He
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Social Networking Services ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
Friedman's Test ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Forest Parks ◽  
Northern City

People’s satisfaction towards the experience in forests is one of most important feedbacks that forest park managers need to meet positive visitors’ experiences. Although the drawbacks of questionnaire methodology are obvious for data collection from self-reported scores at the landscape scale, few alternative methods have been proposed. In this study, nine urban forest parks along the urbanization gradients in three capital cities of Northeast China were targeted to investigate their visitors’ selfies from social networking services (SNS) by assessing facial expressions. A total of 935 photos with location records were obtained from the SNS platform of Sina Micro-Blog in a social hot-event of ‘Golden Week Holidays of National Day of China’ of 2017. Images were recognized by FireFace software to assess scores of neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted, and contempt expressions. Data were ranked in descending order and analyzed by Friedman’s test, correlation analysis, and Poisson regression. Visitors in downtown-forests showed fewer negative expressions at the most northern city than at the southern most one. The negative expressions tended to be alleviated with the increasing distance of forest parks from downtown. However, when the distance reached over 10 km no geographical effect was found. Female visitors showed positive emotional expressions to urban forests while male visitors showed no response. In conclusion, using data from SNS, this study found an experience in forest park less than 10 km from the downtown of a northern city resulted in female visitors showing the most positive expressions.

scholarly journals Understanding the Spatial Distribution of Urban Forests in China Using Sentinel-2 Images with Google Earth Engine

Forests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 729 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qianwen Duan ◽  
Minghong Tan ◽  
Yuxuan Guo ◽  
Xue Wang ◽  
Liangjie Xin
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Forest Cover ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Urban Forests ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Sustainable Urban Development ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Sentinel 2

Urban forests are vitally important for sustainable urban development and the well-being of urban residents. However, there is, as yet, no country-level urban forest spatial dataset of sufficient quality for the scientific management of, and correlative studies on, urban forests in China. At present, China attaches great importance to the construction of urban forests, and it is necessary to map a high-resolution and high-accuracy dataset of urban forests in China. The open-access Sentinel images and the Google Earth Engine platform provide a significant opportunity for the realization of this work. This study used eight bands (B2–B8, B11) and three indices of Sentinel-2 in 2016 to map the urban forests of China using the Random Forest machine learning algorithms at the pixel scale with the support of Google Earth Engine (GEE). The 7317 sample points for training and testing were collected from field visits and very high resolution images from Google Earth. The overall accuracy, producer’s accuracy of urban forest, and user’s accuracy of urban forest assessed by independent validation samples in this study were 92.30%, 92.27%, and 92.18%, respectively. In 2016, the percentage of urban forest cover was 19.2%. Nearly half of the cities had an urban forest cover between 10% and 20%, and the average percentage of large cities whose urban populations were over 5 million was 24.8%. Cities with less than half of the average were mainly distributed in northern and western parts of China, which should be focused on in urban greening planning.

scholarly journals Can Urban Forest Settings Evoke Positive Emotion? Evidence on Facial Expressions and Detection of Driving Factors

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 8687
Author(s):  
Ping Liu ◽  
Mengnan Liu ◽  
Tingting Xia ◽  
Yutao Wang ◽  
Hongxu Wei
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Senior Citizen ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Daily Minimum Temperature ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Mental Well Being

There is increasing interest in experiences of urban forests because relevant studies have revealed that forest settings can promote mental well-being. The mental response to a forest experience can be evaluated by facial expressions, but relevant knowledge is limited at large geographical scales. In this study, a dataset of 2824 photos, detailing the evaluated age (toddler, youth, middle-age, and senior citizen) and gender of urban forest visitors, was collected from Sina Weibo (a social media application similar to Twitter in China) between 1–7 October 2018, in 12 randomly chosen cities in China. Happy and sad expressions were rated as scores by FireFACE software V1.0, and the positive response index (PRI) was calculated by subtracting sad scores from happy scores. Regional environmental factors were collected to detect driving forces using regression analyses. Happy scores were higher in forests than in urban settings, while sad scores for toddlers were lower in forests than in promenades and squares. Females showed more positive emotional expressions than males. Increases in happy scores were driven by the increase of daily minimum temperature; while PRI declined with increases in latitude. Overall, an urban forest experience can evoke positive emotions, which is likely due to comfortable feelings in warm temperatures.

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