Abstract: In this paper, a novel metric is proposed to evaluate the 3-D mesh quality via analyzing curvature, since the curvature describes well the visual characteristics of a 3-D mesh. Firstly, the curvature at each vertex is estimated, then a curvature matrix is constructed in the neighbourhood of each vertex, and the local distortion at each vertex is measured in terms of the differences between the singular values of the curvature matrix in the original mesh and that of the corresponding matrix in the distorted mesh. Finally, the global distortion is obtained by weighted combination of the local distortions. Experimental results reveal that the proposed metric not only achieves superior performance in prediction accuracy over all the other competing metrics, but also has very good robustness and stability.