Simplifying surfaces with color and texture using quadric error metrics

There are a variety of application areas in which there is a need for simplifying complex polygonal surface models. These models often have material properties such as colors, textures, and surface normals. Our surface simplification algorithm, based on iterative edge contraction and quadric error metrics, can rapidly produce high quality approximations of such models. We present a natural extension of our original error metric that can account for a wide range of vertex attributes. CR Categories: I.3.5 Computer Graphics: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling---surface and object representations Keywords: surface simplification, multiresolution modeling, level of detail, quadric error metric, edge contraction, surface properties, discontinuity preservation 1 INTRODUCTION Many applications in computer graphics and visualization can benefit from automatic simplification of complex polygonal models. Such models are usually not only geometrically complex, but they may also have ...