MULTIRESOLUTION REPRESENTATIONS FOR SURFACES MESHES BASED ON THE VERTEX DECIMATION METHOD

The vertex decimation is a general mesh simplification approach. By su ccessively removing vertices a hierarchy of different levels of detail (LOD) is generated during the simplification process. This paper enha nces our 1996 mesh simplification algorithm with error control (R. Kle in, G. Liebich and W. Strasser. Mesh reduction with error control. In Visualization 96, ed. R. Yagel, ACM, November 1996) to preserve some i nformation about the normals of the original faces into the resulting simplified data. This enables us to build multiresolution models (MRM) which allow one to control the normal deviation and to extract view d ependent-adaptive lighting sensitive approximations of the original me shes. Furthermore, the paper gives a general overview on MRMs generate d by vertex removal algorithms. Where necessary material from our prev ious publications scattered in various conference proceedings and shor t papers (some of them hard to access) is included and extended with d etailed algorithms and proofs. Although formulated for a vertex remova l algorithm the results apply to other simplification algorithms and M RMs as well, namely to edge and triangle collapse algorithms. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.