Quantitative Validation of Physically Based Deformable Models in Computer Graphics

Abstract

This paper presents a novel software framework for quantitative validation of physically-based deformable models in computer graphics. In the majority of previous studies, validation is qualitative (through visual plausibility), which is necessarily user subjective. The proposed framework facilitates construction of a single scalar output that quantifies the agreement between the complete time histories of test and reference models. Different models and comparison metrics can be easily included within the general framework. The framework is shown to yield a high accuracy score for a simplified model that can be analytically derived from the reference model, indicating that the framework is reliable. A lower score results when evaluating a more approximate, yet still visually plausible, model, demonstrating the objective sensitivity of the framework. The software framework can thus provide an objective measure of accuracy and a standardised way to quantitatively compare the accuracy of one method against another, whilst also supplying a quantitative rationale for trading accuracy and performance.