Mesh simplification based on Willmore energy weighted quadric error metric

Rendering, storing and transmission of high resolution models composed of large number of triangles primitives represents one of problems that scientific visualization and virtual reality faces. When these models exceed the capacity of the graphics hardware real-time rendering the solution is to simplify the mesh models by eliminating primitives from the original models while trying to keep topological information and main surface characteristics. This paper presents a new approach to the quadric error metric mesh simplification that uses the local surface features to quantify the cost of an edge collapse. We achieve this by using a weight for each quadric error processed that takes into account local Willmore energy. We defined the probability of each vertex to be decimated or not in the simplification process to be the entropy value of the vertex neighborhood Willmore energy values. We demonstrate that our method can obtain better geometric results than QSlim simplifications by preserving local features in regions of high importance for the viewer.