Survey of Polygonal Surface Simplification Algorithms
Paul S. Heckbert, Michael J. Garland · 1997
This paper surveys methods for simplifying and approximating polygonal surfaces. A polygonal surface is a piecewise-linear surface in 3-D defined by a set of polygons; typically a set of triangles. Methods from computer graphics, computer vision, cartography, computational geometry, and other fields are classified, summarized, and compared both practically and theoretically. The surface types range from height fields (bivariate functions), to manifolds, to non-manifold self-intersecting surfaces. Piecewise-linear curve simplification is also briefly surveyed.