An Efficient Method for Surface Simplification Based On Variational Shape Approximation*

Abstract: Providing fast and accurate simplification method for large polygon mesh is one of the most important research focuses in computer graphics. Approximating mesh model with a few polygons can improve the rendering speed, and reduce the storage of the model. The paper presents a local greedy algorithm to minimize the energy defined by variational shape approximation. The algorithm simplifies the mesh by controlling the number of the target polygons, while attempting to get ideal effect by adaptive seed triangles selection. The algorithm has intuitive geometric meaning. The method is efficient enough to be efficiently adopted in the geometric modeling system