Mesh Simplification With Appearance-Driven Optimizations

In this work, we propose a novel solution for simplifying texture-mapped three-dimensional (3D) meshes. It simplifies a 3D triangular mesh to optimally preserve the visual appearance of the original texture-mapped model at reduced vertex budgets. While taking the prevalent strategy of iterative edge contraction, the proposed scheme is novel in that it takes into account the local texture image characteristics when prioritizing local mesh simplification operators, and conducts closed-form optimization when computing the texture coordinates of each replacement vertex. Outstanding performance of the proposed scheme is demonstrated both qualitatively and quantitatively by experimental results. Further, validity of the proposed algorithmic components is well proved through ablation study.