A COMPARISON OF MESH SIMPLIFICATION ALGORITHM

In many applications the need for an accurate simplification of surfac e meshes is becoming more and more urgent. This need is not only due t o rendering speed reasons, but also to allow fast transmission of 3D m odels in network-based applications. Many different approaches and alg orithms for mesh simplification have been proposed in the last few yea rs. We present a survey and a characterization of the fundamental meth ods. Moreover, the results of an empirical comparison of the simplific ation codes available in the public domain are discussed. Five impleme ntations, chosen to give a wide spectrum of different topology preserv ing methods, were run on a set of sample surfaces. We compared empiric al computational complexities and the approximation accuracy of the re sulting output meshes. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reser ved.