An evaluation of several mesh-generation methods using a simple mesh-based image coder

A simple image coder based on triangle meshes is proposed, and several mesh-generation methods are presented, some previously proposed and some new. Then, our coder is used to evaluate the performance of the various mesh-generation methods. One of our proposed mesh-generation schemes, inspired by the work of Garland and Heckbert, is shown to perform best. The performance of linear and Clough-Tocher interpolation is also compared. Linear interpolation is found to perform better than Clough-Tocher interpolation, with the latter performing more poorly largely due to overshoot/undershoot near image edges.