A Comparative Evaluation of Metrics for Fast Mesh Simplification

Abstract

Triangle mesh simplification is of great interest in a variety of knowledge domains, since it allows manipulation and visualization of large models, and it is the starting point for the design of many multiresolution representations. A crucial point in the structure of a simplification method is the definition of an appropriate metric for guiding the decimation process, with the purpose of generating low error approximations at different levels of resolution. This paper proposes two new alternative metrics for mesh simplification, with the aim of producing high-quality results with reduced execution time and memory usage, and being simple to implement. A set of different established metrics is also described and a comparative evaluation of these metrics against the two new metrics is performed. A single implementation is used in the experiments, in order to enable the evaluation of these metrics independently from other simplification aspects. Results obtained from the simplification of a number of models, using the different metrics, are compared.