Mesh simplification on Terrain trees

Topology-aware mesh simplification

Spurious critical points, naturally occurring in data due to noisy acquisitions, can severely affect terrain analysis. For this reason, several simplification approaches capable of removing spurious features, while maintaining important critical points, have been defined in the literature. We recently addressed this problem by defining a local simplification operator, called gradient-aware edge contraction. This operator is capable of reducing the resolution of a TIN while preserving the topology of the underlying terrain. By combining such an operator with a topological simplification operator, users are able to simplify the resolution of both the topology and the geometry of a terrain in a completely controlled way.

A topology-aware mesh simplification can be done with the proposed gradient-aware edge contraction. This library includes the implementation of topology-aware mesh simplification on Terrain trees, and a parallel version of the implementation which utilizes OpenMP.

Source code location

Currently, this library is stored as the features/mesh_simplification_parallel branch of the Terrain trees library GitHub repository. We are planning to merge it to the main library in the near future.

Reference Paper

Yunting Song, Riccardo Fellegara, Federico Iuricich, and Leila De Floriani. Efficient topology-aware simplification of large triangulated terrains. In Proceedings of SIGSPATIAL’21, Beijing, China, November 2–5, 2021, 12 pages. doi

Riccardo Fellegara, Federico Iuricich, Yunting Song, and Leila De Floriani. Terrain trees: a framework for representing, analyzing and visualizing triangulated terrains. GeoInformatica 27.3 (2023): 525-564. doi

Federico Iuricich and Leila De Floriani. 2017. Hierarchical Forman Triangulation: A multiscale model for scalar field analysis. Computers & Graphics 66 (2017), 113–123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2017.05.015