My research interests are centered around the adaptive representation of shape and the efficient display of geometrically complex, visually realistic environments. Much of my recent work has been focused on the design and implementation of effective algorithms for the automatic simplification of highly detailed polygonal surface models into faithful approximations containing fewer polygons. Extremely precise polygonal surface models are now widely available, in large part due to advances in scanning technology. Models of this complexity, perhaps several million polygons, frequently contain far more detail than required for the target application.
Simplification can provide more economical models, containing only the amount of detail necessary.
These methods also provide a useful means for analyzing the shape of objects at multiple scales. The primary result of my research in automatic surface simplification has been my quadric-based simplification algorithm . My emphasis was on developing a practical and effective algorithm, one which would be efficient, produce good results, and which would be simple to implement. This quadric-based algorithm works quite well in practice, and a more theoretical analysis has shown that there is a direct connection between the quadric error metric and the curvature of the surface under consideration. The figure below demonstrates a real-world example of the performance of my algorithm.