Geometry and texture based simplification of 3D meshes

There are a variety of application areas in which 3D triangular mesh simplification is necessary. These meshes often have material properties such as colors, textures, and surface normals. In this paper we propose a new simplification method, which reduces the number of triangles in a model by performing a sequence of half-edge collapses. It differs from many previous simplification methods in that it uses both geometry and texture based error metrics to estimate the edge costs. As expected, our approach can produce models of high visual and geometric fidelity.