Data—Dependent Surface Simplification

In Scientific Visualization, surfaces have often attached data, e. g. cutting surfaces or isosurfaces in numerical simulations with multiple data components. These surfaces can be e. g. the output of a marching cubes algorithm which produces a large number of very small triangles. Existing triangle decimation algorithms use purely geometric criteria to simplify over sampled surfaces. This approach can lead to coarse representations of the surface in areas with high data gradients, thus loosing important information.