A linear time algorithm for high quality mesh simplification

High resolution 3D range scanning as well as iso-surface extraction have introduced densely and uniformly sampled models that are difficult to render at an interactive rate. To remove excessive details and produce meshes of various resolutions for different kinds of applications, the study of fast and high quality polygonal mesh simplification algorithms has become important. In this paper, we propose a new linear time algorithm that can achieve fast and high quality mesh simplification. In the new algorithm, we pipeline the cost computation, optimization, and edge collapse, and use a small constant-sized replacement selection min-heap instead of a large greedy queue to effectively reduce the runtime complexity to linear complexity. Compared to previous works, our new algorithm has at least three advantages. First, the new algorithm is runtime efficient. Second, the new algorithm is memory efficient. Third, the algorithm is capable of generating competitive high quality outputs.