Mesh simplification using ellipsoidal schema for isotropic quantization of face-normal vectors

In this paper, we present a method for simplification of arbitrary 3D meshes that is based on Isotropic Quantization of face-normal vectors. There are three stages. Firstly, a codebook that contains the unique face-normal vectors of the 3D mesh is generated using our Ellipsoidal Schema. Secondly, the polygons of the mesh are grouped into patches: based on the codebook vectors and the locality information of the polygons. Polygons that have isotropic and geographical similarities are grouped together. And the resulting patch is approximately a flat plane with its corresponding codebook vector as its normal. In the last stage, our mesh simplification technique re-triangulates the patch, in which the algorithm only considers the vertices on the borders of the patch. We demonstrate that our technique yields better results when applied with multiple iterations than when using a single iteration. Thus using patch-wise quantization, our technique is able to simplify 3D meshes.