Visual Quality Assessment of 3D Models: On the Influence of Light-Material Interaction

Geometric modifications of three-dimensional (3D) digital models are commonplace for the purpose of efficient rendering or compact storage. Modifications imply visual distortions that are hard to measure numerically. They depend not only on the model itself but also on how the model is visualized. We hypothesize that the model's light environment and the way it reflects incoming light strongly influences perceived quality. Hence, we conduct a perceptual study demonstrating that the same modifications can be masked, or conversely highlighted, by different light-matter interactions. Additionally, we propose a new metric that predicts the perceived distortion of 3D modifications for a known interaction. It operates in the space of 3D meshes with the object's appearance, that is, the light emitted by its surface in any direction given a known incoming light. Despite its simplicity, this metric outperforms 3D mesh metrics and competes with sophisticated perceptual image-based metrics in terms of correlation to subjective measurements. Unlike image-based methods, it has the advantage of being computable prior to the costly rendering steps of image projection and rasterization of the scene for given camera parameters.