A Visual and Geometry-based Hybrid Approach for Surface Simplification

Abstract

In this paper, a novel visual and geometry-based simplification approach is proposed for simplifying polygonal meshes. This approach is driven by a visual importance weighted quadric error metric, which measures not only the geometry differentiation but also the local surface variation. We define the visual importance of one vertex based on its vertex curvature entropy which reflects the visually variation of the region centered at this vertex. We observe that such a definition of visual importance is capable of capturing visually interesting regions on a mesh. By combining the visual importance and quadric error metric to measure the edge collapse error, this algorithm produces simplified model closer to the original one according to visual similarity. One main application of this algorithm is the simplification of models for video games where the models are usually geometrically not very complex, and in which visual similarity is the most important requirement.

Keywords:

• mesh simplification
• level of detail
• information theory