Abstract: The design of detail-preserving filter is a hot research topic in the area of computer graphics and computer vision. Incorporating the local roughness measurement of 3d meshes into energy minimization scheme, a novel visual perceptual roughness based local detail-preserving filter is presented in this paper. First, the energy function usually contains two correlative items: the smooth item and the detail-preserving item which will be balanced by the local roughness of the underlying model. Then, under the assumption that the vertices of smooth model are linear correlative with the corresponding vertices of original model, the proposed energy can be effectively minimized. The minimization of the energy will lead to the final smooth mesh. Our local detail-preserving filter can be applied to many applications, such as mesh smoothing & denoising, model layered detail enhancement, etc. Experimental results illustrate that the presented filter is effective and universal to many applications of digital geometry processing.