• Korean Journal of Environment and Ecology
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.289-300
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• 2008

This study aims to discriminate differences in natural landscapes between the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland and the Jirisan National Park in Korea, using functions of content-based image retrieval such as texture, shape, and color. Digital photographs of each National Park were taken and selected. The low-level functions of photographic images were reduced to orthogonally rotated five factors. Based on the reduced factors, a linear decision boundary was obtained between Cairngorms landscapes and Jirisan landscapes. As a result, the discriminant function significantly delineated two groups, resulting in $x^2=63.40$ with df=5(p<0.001). Both the eigenvalue 2.417 and the value of wilks' lambda 0.29 supported that the most proportion of total variability came from the differences between the means of discriminant function of groups. It was estimated that four independent variables explained about 70.7% of total variance of dependent variable. The variable with the largest effect on landscapes was far region-related factor(r=1.07), followed by near region-related factor (r=0.90). A total of 90.7% of cross-validated grouped cases were correctly classified. It was interpreted that far distant regions, as well as near distant regions, had sufficient discrimination power for landscape classification between the Cairngorms National Park and the Jirisan National Park, so that landscape identity of the National Park over cultures was revealed by skylines in a most effective way. Relatively fewer factors making visual landscapes were effectively used to classify natural landscapes of the National Parks which had different semantics.