A spatio-temporal metric for dynamic mesh comparison Libor Vasa, Vaclav Skala University of West Bohemia, Department of Computer Science and Engineering Univerzitni 22, Pilsen, Czech Republic {lvasa, skala}@kiv.zcu.cz Abstract. A new approach to comparison of dynamic meshes based on Hausdorff distance is presented along with examples of application of such metric. The technique presented is based on representation of a 3D dynamic mesh by a 4D static tetrahedral mesh. Issues concerning space-time relations, mesh consistency and distance computation are addressed, yielding a fully applicable algorithm. Necessary speedup techniques are also discussed in detail and many possible applications of the proposed metric are outlined. 1 Introduction Dynamic mesh extraction from multicamera recordings of real scenes has become a common task of computer graphics of these days. Algorithms running in real time are being developed and used in common practice, producing high quality dynamic meshes that can be used for all kinds of purposes, from 3D television to elaborate experimental techniques requiring exact measurement. However, today’s hardware is still far from being powerful enough to handle the produced data in the raw form. Limited bandwidth is usually the main bottleneck, but also processing power and memory requirements may become difficult to meet. Various techniques of data rate reduction of dynamic meshes are already appearing, usually involving some kind of lossy value compression scheme combined with some elaborate prediction technique [3,7,5]. One can also expect that there will appear techniques of geometry decimation of the dynamic mesh, similar to algorithms used for static mesh simplification [8]. The purpose of this contribution is to provide an objective methodology of comparing dynamic meshes. Such technique will be needed in order to compare and evaluate the compression methods and we will show that it may be used for other purposes as well.