A Survey of Polygonal Simplification Algorithms
David P. Luebke · 1997
Polygonal simplification is at once a very current and a very old topic in computer graphics. As early as 1976 James Clark described the benefits of representing objects within a scene at several resolutions, and flight simulators have long used hand-crafted multi-resolution models of airplanes to guarantee a constant frame rate [Clark 76, Cosman 81]. Recent years have seen a flurry of research into generating such multiresolution representations of objects automatically by simplifying the polygonal geometry of the object. This paper surveys the field of polygonal simplification, describing the current state-of-the-art as well as attempting to identify the major issues and trends in the field to date. 2. INTRODUCTION Polygonal models currently dominate the field of interactive three-dimensional computer graphics. This is largely because their mathematical simplicity allows rapid rendering of polygonal datasets, which in turn has led to widely available polygon rendering hardware. In ...