Imperceptibility thresholds in quantised 3D triangle meshes.

In certain stages of the graphics pipeline, and most notably during compression for storage, triangle meshes may undergo a fixed-point arithmetic quantisation of their geometry. In this paper, we study the imperceptibility thresholds of quantised triangle meshes, that is, the number of bits per vertex coordinate below which the mesh is deemed visually too coarse and quantisation artifacts become perceptible. Our study is based on a psychophysical experiment with a two-alternative forced choice design. Our initial results indicate that factors such as the number of triangles in the mesh, and the strength of the specular component in the reflection model of the rendering algorithm, do affect the quantisation thresholds.