Published in

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 1(13), p. 145-155, 2007

DOI: 10.1109/tvcg.2007.21

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Streaming Simplification of Tetrahedral Meshes

This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Red circle
Published version: archiving forbidden
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Unstructured tetrahedral meshes are commonly used in scientific computing to represent scalar, vector, and tensor fields in three dimensions. Visualization of these meshes can be difficult to perform interactively due to their size and complexity. By reducing the size of the data, we can accomplish real-time visualization necessary for scientific analysis. We propose a two-step approach for streaming simplification of large tetrahedral meshes. Our algorithm arranges the data on disk in a streaming, I/O-efficient format that allows coherent access to the tetrahedral cells. A quadric-based simplification is sequentially performed on small portions of the mesh in-core. Our output is a coherent streaming mesh which facilitates future processing. Our technique is fast, produces high quality approximations, and operates out-of-core to process meshes too large for main memory.