Surface simplification using a discrete curvature norm

This paper proposes a mesh simplification algorithm using a discrete curvature norm. Most of the simplification algorithms are using a distance metric to date. The distance metric is very efficient to measure geometric error, but it is difficult to distinguish important shape features such as a high-curvature region even though it has a small distance metric. We suggest a discrete curvature norm to measure geometric error for such features. During simplification the new vertex resulted from an edge collapse takes a position using a butterfly subdivision mask to minimize geometric error. This paper shows that simplification results have smaller geometric errors than previous works, when a discrete curvature norm and a distance metric are together applied to its criterion. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.