Range data simplification for reverse engineering

Presented in this paper is a procedure enabling the direct extraction of a simplified triangular mesh from a range image. Although there have been many existing algorithms for simplifying geometric models, they can not be applied to a range image, because most of them have been developed in the context of triangular meshes. The proposed simplification algorithm works directly on a range image, and it is not necessary to convert a range image into a triangular mesh. In developing such a simplification algorithm, the major challenge is handling the topology changes caused by the edge contractions. The key idea of the paper is to employ an additional data structure, called a 'flag map', for the support of the irregular topology changes that happen during the simplification procedure. The proposed algorithm has been implemented, and test with various examples.