Improvements of the Surface Mesh Simplification package

The project will include adding new approaches to already existing triangulated mesh simplification framework of CGAL.

The current approach depends on a method developed by Turk & Lindstrom, which is based on edge collapsing. The first suggested new approach is based on the algorithm developed by Garland & Heckbert. It uses vertex collapsing instead of edge collapsing as the primitive operation. In their method, they collapse vertices that share an edge or that are close to each other. In each iteration, a pair of vertices get collapsed resulting in a new vertex. They choose the pair that will be collapsed based on an error metric expressed as a quadratic function. They choose the pair that minimizes the error metric. A parallel version of Garland & Heckbert will also be implemented.

After implementing this approach in CGAL, CGAL’s triangulated mesh simplification framework will be compared to other libraries in terms of runtime and memory usage. (OpenMesh, MeshLab, PCL)

This cycle will be repeated for other mesh simplification methods.