Traditional iterative contraction based polygonal mesh simplification (PMS) algorithms usually require enormous amounts of main memory cost in processing large meshes. On the other hand, fast out-of-core algorithms based on the grid re-sampling scheme usually produce low quality output. In this paper, we propose a novel cache-based approach to large polygonal mesh simplification. The new approach introduces the use of a cache layer to accelerate external memory accesses and to reduce the main memory cost to constant. Through the analysis on the impact of heap size to the locality of references, a constant sized heap is suggested instead of a large greedy heap. From our experimental results, we find that the new approach is able to generate very good quality approximations efficiently with very low main memory cost.
['Hung-Kuang Chen', 'Chin-Shyurng Fahn', 'Jeffrey J. P. Tsai', 'Ming-Bo Lin']
A novel cache-based approach to large polygonal mesh simplification