Mesh simplification based on texture connected areas

We present a simplification method based on Texture Connected Areas (TCAs for short) in which all vertices in the same position have the same texture coordinates. Firstly, we calculate the local weight for each edge in a TCA by taking into account the edge's space length and texture length. Then based on TCAs which contain the edge, we get a global weight for it. Finally, based on edge collapses, edges with smallest weight from the minimum heap will be removed continuously until we get the goal. Because this method is based on TCAs which represent the semantics of a mesh and takes into consideration the local and global information of an edge on meshes, it can effectively avoid the distortion of textures and maintain their visual characteristics.