1 Mesh Simplification in Parallel

This paper presents a parallel method for progressive mesh simplification. A progressive mesh (PM) is a continuous mesh representation of a given 3D object which makes it possible to efficiently access all mesh representations between a low and a high level of resolution. The creation of a progressive mesh is a time consuming process and has a need for parallelization. Our parallel approach considers the original mesh as a graph and performs first a greedy graph part itioning. Then, each partition is sent to a processor of a coarse-grained parallel system. The individual mesh partitions are converted in parallel to the PM format using a serial algorithm on each processor. The results are then merged together to produce a single large PM file. This merging process also solves the border problem within the partition in a simple and efficient way. Our approach enables us to achieve close to optimal speedup. We demonstrate the results experimentally on a number of data sets.