Area of surface as a basis for vertex removal based mesh simplification

A new, area-based mesh simplification algorithm is described. The proposed algorithm removes the center vertex of a polygon which consists of n≥3 faces and represents that polygon with n-2 faces. A global search method is introduced that iteratively determines which vertex is to be removed using the proposed area-based distortion measurement. Various re-triangulations are also considered to improve the perceptual quality of the final approximation. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm for data reduction while maintaining the quality of the rendered objects.