Perceived quality assessment of polygonal meshes using observer studies: a new extended protocol

The complexity of a polygonal mesh is usually reduced by applying a simplification method, resulting in a similar mesh having less vertices and faces. Although several such methods have been developed, only a few observer studies are reported comparing the perceived quality of the simplified meshes, and it is not yet clear how the choice of a given method, and the level of simplification achieved, influence the quality of the resulting mesh, as perceived by the final users. Similar issues occur regarding other mesh processing methods such as smoothing. Mesh quality indices are the obvious less costly alternative to user studies, but it is also not clear how they relate to perceived quality, and which indices best describe the users behavior. This paper describes on going work concerning the evaluation of perceived quality of polygonal meshes using observer studies, while looking for a quality index which estimates user performance. In particular, given some results obtained in previous studies, a new experimental protocol was designed and a study involving 55 users was carried out, which allowed their validation, as well as further insight regarding mesh quality, as perceived by human observers.