Metro: Measuring Error on Simplified Surfaces

This paper presents a new tool, Metro, designed t o c ompensate for a deeciency in many simpliication methods proposed in literature. Metro allows one to compare the diierence b etween a pair of surfaces e.g. a triangulated mesh and its simpliied r epresentation by adopting a surface sampling approach. It has been designed as a highly general tool, and it does no assuption on the particular approach used to build the simpliied r epresentation. It returns both numerical results meshes areas and volumes, maximum and mean error, etc. and visual results, by coloring the input surface a c c ording to the approximation error.