In this paper, we present a full-reference quality assessment metric based on the information of visual saliency. The saliency information is provided under the form of degrees associated to each vertex of the surface mesh. From these degrees, statistical attributes reflecting the structures of the reference and distorted meshes are computed. These are used by four comparisons functions genetically optimized that quantify the structure differences between a reference and a distorted mesh. We also present a statistical comparison study of six full-reference quality assessment metrics for 3D meshes. We compare the objective metrics results with humans subjective scores of quality considering the 3D meshes in one hand and the distorsion types in the other hand. Also, we show which metrics are statistically superior to their counterparts. For these comparisons we use the Spearman Rank Ordered Correlation Coefficient and the hypothetic test of Student (ttest). To attest the pertinence of the proposed approach, a comparison with a ground truth saliency and an application associated to the assessment of the visual rendering of smoothing algorithms are presented. Experimental results show that the proposed metric is very competitive with the state-of-the-art.