A No-Reference Visual Quality Metric For 3D Color Meshes

To improve the viewers’ quality of experience (QoE) in computer graphics applications, the visual quality assessment (VQA) of 3D meshes is becoming a popular task in the multimedia area. Since 3D meshes are quite sensitive to the processing operations like simplification and compression, many studies concerning the VQA of 3D meshes have been carried out to measure the caused degradations. However, the previous studies mostly utilize full-reference metrics and focus mainly on the geometry attributes. While in some application scenarios such as 3D reconstruction, digital entertainment, and medical modeling, the reference 3D mesh is not always available and the color information can not be ignored. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a no-reference visual quality metric for 3D color meshes, which is based on the statistical parameters and entropy estimated from the probability distributions of curvature, dihedral angles, face area, face angle, and diffuse color information. The performance of the proposed method is validated on a database specially built for VQA of 3D color meshes. Experimental results show that our metric operates stably and achieves the highest correlation with subjective judgement.