Perceptually Driven Simplification of Lit, Textured Meshes

David Luebke
University of Virginia

Jonathan Cohen
Johns Hopkins University

Nathaniel Williams
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Mike Kelly
University of Virginia

Brenden Schubert
University of Virginia

Proceedings of the 2003 Symposium on Interactive 3-D Graphics

Abstract

We present a new algorithm for best-effort simplification of polygonal meshes based on principles of visual perception. Following previous work, we use a simple model of low-level human vision to estimate the perceptibility of local simplification operations in a view-dependent multitriangulation structure. Our algorithm improves on prior perceptual simplification approaches by accounting for textured models and dynamic lighting effects. We also model more accurately the scale of visual changes resulting from simplification, using parameterized texture deviation to bound the size (represented as spatial frequency) of features destroyed, created, or altered by simplifying the mesh. The resulting algorithm displays many desirable properties: it is viewdependent, sensitive to silhouettes, sensitive to underlying texture content, and sensitive to illumination (for example, preserving detail near highlight and shadow boundaries, while aggressively simplifying washed-out regions). Using a unified perceptual model to evaluate these effects automatically accounts for their relative importance and balances between them, overcoming the need for ad hoc or hand-tuned heuristics.

Paper


David Luebke