Feature-Preserving Simplification of Texture-Mapped Models

A feature-preserving multi-resolution simplification algorithm based on half-edge collapse operation for texture-mapped models is proposed. A new error metric based on the geometric importance the texture-attribute importance of a half-edge is presented. It can generate a low-polygon-count approximation model with shape preservation and texture attributes preservation. In addition, the half-edge based scheme is more efficient in memory usage and convenient for generating progressive meshes with texture attributes for real-time transmission of various surface data on the Web. The visual comparisons showing that the proposed algorithm results in higher quality approximations of original models with texture attribute preservation even at very low levels of detail than other algorithms in the literature