Surface Approximation Utilizing Orientation of Local Surface

The primary goal of surface approximation is to reduce the degree of deviation of the simplified surface from the original surface. However it is difficult to define the metric that can measure the amount of deviation quantitatively. Many of the existing studies analogize it by using the change of the scalar quantity before and after simplification. This approach makes a lot of sense in the point that the local surfaces with small scalar are relatively less important since they make a low impact on the adjacent areas and thus can be removed from the current surface. However using scalar value alone there can exist many cases that cannot compute the degree of geometric importance of local surface. Especially the perceptual geometric features providing important clues to understand an object, in our observation, are generally constructed with small scalar value. This means that the distinguishing features can be removed in the earlier stage of the simplification process. In this paper, to resolve this problem, we present various factors and their combination as the metric for calculating the deviation error by introducing the orientation of local surfaces. Experimental results indicate that the surface orientation has an important influence on measuring deviation error and the proposed combined error metric works well retaining the relatively high curvature regions on the object's surface constructed with various and complex curvatures.