Perceived Quality of Simplified Polygonal Meshes: Evaluation using Observer Studies

Abstract

The complexity of a polygonal mesh model 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, 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. Following on work carried out by the authors, but only for mesh models of the lungs [SSSMF05, SSFM05], a comparison among the results of three mesh simplification methods, for a few generic models and two simplification levels, was performed through a controlled experiment involving 65 observers. The goal was to ascertain whether the main findings previously obtained for lung models, through a study with 32 subjects, could be generalized to other types of models and confirmed for a larger number of observers. This was verified through the analysis of the data collected from the experiment, which shows that, regarding perceived quality, users are indeed sensitive to the mesh simplification method used and that this sensitivity varies with the simplification level.