Salient global geometry features preserving mesh simplification

During the last two decades, many effective algorithms have been proposed which make efforts in reducing the approximation error. However, most of them paid no attention to keep the salient geometry features, which in many cases influence the approximation of simplified mesh seriously, especially when models of very low polygon count are desired. This is due to the fact that the existing automatic methods don't take salient global features into account. In this paper, we propose a quadric error metric based triangle mesh simplification method, which can preserve the salient global features efficiently. This work consists of two stages. The first stage detects the salient features of the model. The second stage is the edges contraction using appropriate weight according to the salience of the features, which can postpone the salient edges contraction. Experiment results show that this method can not only preserve the salient features efficiently, but also produce less simplification error than traditional edge contraction method using QEM.