Evaluation for Small Visual Difference Between Conforming Meshes on Strain Field

This paper gives a method of quantifying small visual differences between 3D mesh models with conforming topology, based on the theory of strain fields. Strain field is a geometric quantity in elasticity which is used to describe the deformation of elastomer. In this paper we consider the 3D models as objects with elasticity. The further demonstrations are provided: the first is intended to give the reader a visual impression of how our measure works in practice; and the second is to give readers a visual impression of how our measure works in evaluating filter algorithms. Our experiments show that our difference estimates are well correlated with human perception of differences. This work has applications in the evaluation of 3D mesh watermarking, 3D mesh compression reconstruction, and 3D mesh filtering. Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. This work was supported by the National Basic Research 973 Program of China under Grant No. 2006CB303104, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60673004, and an EPSRC Travel Grant. The preliminary version of this paper and the early version for this work has been published on GMP2008.