A practical mesh simplification algorithm applied in molecular optical simulation environment

As a challenging task for molecular optical imaging simulation, virtual optical environment is needed to achieve optical signals with high precision on the external surface of small animal. In general, millions of triangle meshes are used to model complicated biological tissues and irregular bioluminescent sources in virtual optical environment. Therefore, mesh simplification is very important for storage, transmission, process, and real-time rendering in molecular optical simulation. In this paper, a practical mesh simplification algorithm combining half-edge data structure and modified Quadric Error Metrics is introduced in detail, which has been successfully applied in our molecular optical simulation environment. Experiments and error analysis show that the proposed method yields optimal speedup and high accuracy at the end of the paper.