Mesh simplification with average planes for 3-D image

Mesh simplification is a very important stage in three dimensional image construction. In most cases, a model consists of many triangles. It is difficult to render, transmit and store the model data. This paper proposes a mesh simplification method based on computing the average planes combined by adjacent vertices of every edge and two edge vertices. We compute RMS (root mean square) distance error of all these vertices of the edge to the average plane. Two RMS error values, the edge length and one penalty item are combined to produce the final error metric. According to this value, the curvature of the facet can be decided. The edge with least error metric is selected to collapse. One model without boundary and two models with boundary are used to test the efficiency of the proposed method.