An experimental evaluation of 3D mesh decimation techniques

Recent trends in computer graphics has lead to a spectacular grow of the amount of complex 3D objects stored and exchanged over the Internet. In this context accurate mesh decimations schemes are becoming more and more urgent due to the rendering speed reason and fast transmission. In this paper we present a complete evaluation of the mesh simplification techniques existing in the technical literature. After a short survey and characterization of the local and global simplification schemes we retained only the most efficient algorithms for a further analysis. In order to obtain a competitive evaluation, two different metrics were considered: Hausdorff and mean geometric error, which determine the deviance between the original model and the simplified version of it. We compared the approximation accuracy for each technique and established the optimal method in terms of decimation rates and precision.