Towards Perceptual Simplification of Models with Arbitrary Materials

Abstract

Real-time rendering of models with high polygon count is still an important issue in interactive computer graphics. A common way to improve rendering performance is to generate different levels of detail of a model. These are mostly computed using polygonal simplification techniques, which aim to reduce the number of polygons without significant loss of visual fidelity. Most existing algorithms use geometric error bounds, which are well-suited for silhouette preservation. They ignore the fact that a much more aggressive simplification is possible in low-contrast areas inside the model. The main contribution of this paper is an efficient simplification algorithm based on the human visual system. The key idea is to move the domain of error computation from image-space to vertex-space to avoid a costly per-pixel comparison. This way the error estimation of a simplification operation can be accelerated significantly. To account for the human vision, we introduce a perceptually based metric depending on the contrast and spatial frequency of the model at a single vertex. Finally, we validate our approach with a user study.