High Quality and Shape Preserving Triangular Mesh Decimation

Triangular mesh decimation is widely used in multi-resolution model rendering, network transmission, computer animation and many other fields. Most of the existing algorithms for decimation of triangular meshes perform poorly at very low levels of detail. Abnormal triangles such as long-narrow, much larger or smaller than normal size are often introduced into the decimation results. A synthesis optimization method was proposed which considers the triangle shape, dihedral angle between two triangles which share a common edge and edge lengths in the process of calculating edge collapse costs based on QEM, and also propose a virtual edge collapse method attempting to find a local optimization. The proposed method can achieve much better regular decimation results under the condition of preserving visually important parts of the mesh details. The proposed method also has smaller memory consumption and execution time than most of the published notable algorithms.