Multiresolution modeling of arbitrary polygonal surfaces: a characterization

Recent technological advances have favored the apparition of highly detailed objects and, consequently, their availability for a wide diversity of applications. Normally, these objects are represented by means of complex polygonal surfaces formed by hundreds of thousands of polygons, which produce important increases in the costs of storage, transmission and visualization. Multiresolution modeling, which allows an object to be represented by means of a set of approximations, each with a different number of polygons, has been successfully presented as a solution for the efficient manipulation of this type of objects. Although the first references to multiresolution modeling appeared more than 20 years ago, most of the multiresolution schemes specifically applied to polygonal surfaces have been proposed recently. This paper, after a brief review of multiresolution modeling, presents a characterization of the most interesting multiresolution schemes for arbitrary polygonal surfaces. The objective is to make the similarities and differences between them easily visible. With this aim, a series of characteristics is enumerated. These characteristics have commonly been used to define the multiresolution schemes and they are arranged together depending on whether they refer to the applications, to the input data or to the internal operation.