Spectrum AUC Difference (SAUCD): Human-aligned 3D Shape Evaluation
This work addresses the inconsistency between automated 3D shape evaluation metrics and human perception, which is crucial for applications in computer graphics and vision, though it is incremental as it builds on spectral analysis methods.
The authors tackled the problem of evaluating 3D mesh shapes by proposing SAUCD, a metric that better aligns with human perception by considering both overall and local details, and demonstrated its superiority over existing metrics with a high correlation to human evaluations from over 800 subjects.
Existing 3D mesh shape evaluation metrics mainly focus on the overall shape but are usually less sensitive to local details. This makes them inconsistent with human evaluation, as human perception cares about both overall and detailed shape. In this paper, we propose an analytic metric named Spectrum Area Under the Curve Difference (SAUCD) that demonstrates better consistency with human evaluation. To compare the difference between two shapes, we first transform the 3D mesh to the spectrum domain using the discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator and Fourier transform. Then, we calculate the Area Under the Curve (AUC) difference between the two spectrums, so that each frequency band that captures either the overall or detailed shape is equitably considered. Taking human sensitivity across frequency bands into account, we further extend our metric by learning suitable weights for each frequency band which better aligns with human perception. To measure the performance of SAUCD, we build a 3D mesh evaluation dataset called Shape Grading, along with manual annotations from more than 800 subjects. By measuring the correlation between our metric and human evaluation, we demonstrate that SAUCD is well aligned with human evaluation, and outperforms previous 3D mesh metrics.