Generic attribute deviation metric for assessing mesh simplification algorithm quality

This paper describes an efficient method to compare two triangular meshes. Meshes considered here contain geometric features as well as other surface attributes such as material colors, texture, temperature, radiation, etc. Two deviation measurements are presented to assess the differences between two meshes. The first measurement, called geometric deviation, returns geometric differences. The second measurement, called attribute deviation, returns attribute differences regardless of the attribute type. We present an application of this method to the mesh simplification algorithm (MSA) quality assessment according to the appearance attributes. This assessment allows the appreciation of local quality and the computation of global quality statistics of a simplified mesh.