Octree based decimation algorithm for triangle isosurface using simplified patterns

It is universally acknowledged that SMC based on simplified patterns extracts less triangles than the standard MC. Because only in-cube decimation was exploited, SMC is not able to take full advantage of local features of isosurfaces. Based on this observation, a new method named OSMC is presented in this paper. Based on characteristics of simplified configuration, OSMC first use octree structure to organize cells as nodes, then merge the nodes from bottom to top, and finally achieve local area triangles merging. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed method does further decimation than SMC, especially for datasets with large flat areas. The proposed method achieves an average reduction rate up to 55.1%, while the average reduction rate for SMC is 29.7%. The reduction rate reaches 80% at the highest and it is above 50% in average when OSMC is used on high-resolution geological dataset. Moreover, the new method is more adaptive to the increment of the dataset resolution.