High-performance simplification of triangular surfaces using a GPU

Due to advances in high-performance computing technologies, computer graphics techniques—especially those related to mesh simplification—have been noticeably improved. These techniques, which have a strong impact on many applications, such as geometric modeling and visualization, have been well studied for more than two decades. Recent advances in GPUs have led to significant improvements in terms of speed and interactivity. In this paper, we present a mesh simplification algorithm that benefits from the parallel framework provided by recent GPUs. We customize the halfedge data structure for adaption with the dynamic memory restrictions of CUDA. The proposed algorithm is fully parallelized by employing a lock-free skip priority queue and a set of disjoint regions of the mesh. The proposed technique accelerates the simplification process while preserving the topological properties of the mesh. Some results and comparisons are provided to verify the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.