SimpliGuard: Robust Mesh Simplification In the Wild

Peibin Chen, Xijin Zhang, Daniel Kang Du

Abstract: Polygonal meshes are widely used to represent complex geometries. However, the increasing complexity of models often leads to large meshes with millions of triangles, raising significant challenges for storage, transmission, and computation. Mesh simplification, a process of reducing the number of triangles in a mesh while preserving its overall shape and important features, has emerged as an indispensable technique to address these challenges. In this work, we focus on the problem of obtaining a visually consistent ultra-low-polygon mesh for complex meshes. Unlike previous methods, we design a robust simplification framework, SimpliGuard, to handle any meshes in the wild. Firstly, a reconstruction module is used to construct a low-polygon mesh with a similar shape but a manifold topology. Then, a texture initialization module is employed to quickly initialize the entire texture map. After that, a differentiable rendering module is utilized to optimize the overall structure and texture details, ensuring high-quality results. For meshes with skeletons, the correctness of motion can be preserved with our designed motion post-processing module. Experimental results demonstrate that SimpliGuard significantly outperforms previous methods and various featured software, including Blender and Simplygon.

Relevance To Conference: Mesh simplification enables complex 3D models to be presented to users at higher frame rates, providing a smooth interactive experience. It reduces the computational burden of graphics rendering and processing, allowing users to naturally manipulate and explore virtual environments. By reducing the complexity of models, this technology decreases resource consumption, enabling games and VR applications to run on resource-limited devices, thereby offering wider accessibility and playability to users.However, existing automatic mesh simplification techniques often struggle to produce satisfactory results for arbitrary meshes and cannot guarantee the correctness of animation after simplification. In this work, we propose an innovative framework that can generate extremely low-polygon and motion-correct meshes within minutes, significantly enhancing the user's immersive experience.

Primary Subject Area: [Experience] Interactions and Quality of Experience

Secondary Subject Area: [Systems] Systems and Middleware

Submission Number: 1416