Many factors, such as the number of vertices and the resolution of texture, can affect the display quality of three-dimensional (3-D) objects. When the resources of a graphics system are not sufficient to render the ideal image, degradation is inevitable. It is, therefore, important to study how individual factors will affect the overall quality, and how the degradation can be controlled given limited resources. In this paper, the essential factors determining the display quality are reviewed. We then integrate two important ones, resolution of texture and resolution of wireframe, and use them in our model as a perceptual metric. We assess this metric using statistical data collected from a 3-D quality evaluation experiment. The statistical model and the methodology to assess the display quality metric are discussed. A preliminary study of the reliability of the estimates is also described. The contribution of this paper lies in: 1) determining the relative importance of wireframe versus texture resolution in perceptual quality evaluation and 2) proposing an experimental strategy for verifying and fitting a quantitative model that estimates 3-D perceptual quality. The proposed quantitative method is found to fit closely to subjective ratings by human observers based on preliminary experimental results.
