A Memory Efficient Simplification Algorithm of Polygonal Meshes

We present a new model simplification algorithm based on edge collapse. The measure of geometric deviation resulted from an edge collapse transformation plays a basic role in the simplification process. We give a new technique to measure this deviation, which try to measure the change of area and normal of triangles adjacent to the contracting edge. The algorithm is easy to implement and involve simple computations, so it is computationally efficient. The error cost is based only on current simplified model, which means no geometric history is needed to be retained, so the algorithm is also memory efficient. Results and numerical comparisons show that our algorithm generates simplified models 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 model.