3D Range Image Simplification

Abstract

This paper proposes an simplification algorithm of a range image. One of the merits of the proposed approach is that it is not necessary to convert the range image into a triangular mesh (initial triangular mesh), a process that requires a large amount of memory, because the proposed algorithm works directly on a range image. 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. As the flag map is able to maintain all the history of the topology changes, an easy extraction of the simplified triangular mesh from the flag map is possible.