Feature-preserving and memory-efficient simplification of polygonal meshes

We propose a new automatic edge collapse simplification algorithm, which is not only fast and memory efficient but also automatically preserves visually important features of a mesh. In an edge collapse algorithm, a sequence of edge collapse transformations determined by an optimal greedy approach is applied until an approximating mesh of required size or of given tolerance is obtained. The way of measuring the geometric error introduced as a result of an edge collapse transformation plays a crucial role in determining the priority ordering of such transformations. We introduce a new idea to measure this error based only on current simplified mesh and error accumulation. The proposed technique for measuring geometric error is not only simple to implement but also memory efficient. The presented algorithm consumes less memory and takes less execution time than most of the published edge collapse based algorithms. Results and numerical comparisons show that our algorithm generates simplified meshes of good visual fidelity, which are comparable with those by other methods.