Fast, Simple, Feature Preserving and Memory Efficient Simplification of Triangle Meshes

We propose a new iterative algorithm for the automatic geometric simplification of a triangle mesh based on edge collapse transformations. The way how geometric deviation resulted from an edge collapse transformation is measured plays a basic role in inducing a priority ordering on the set of edge collapse transformations to control the simplification process. We introduce a new technique to measure this deviation based only on current simplified mesh and the new concept of accumulating the cost of collapse, which are easy to implement and involve simple computations making the algorithm computationally efficient. No geometric history is needed to be retained, so the resulting algorithm is also memory efficient. Results and numerical comparisons show that our algorithm generates simplified meshes of good visual fidelity, which compares well with those by other methods in terms of maximum and mean geometric error and it preserves the visually important features of the original mesh.