Selection Of An Optimal Polyhedral Surface Model Using The Minimum Description Length Principle

In this paper a new approach to find an optimal surface representation is described. It is shown that the minimum description length (MDL) principle can be used to select a trade-off between goodness-of-fit and complexity of decimated mesh representations. A given mesh is iteratively simplified by using different decimation algorithms. At each step the two-part minimum description length is evaluated. The first part encodes all model parameters while the second part encodes the error residuals given the model. A Bayesian approach is used to deduce the MDL term. The shortest code length identifies the optimal trade-off. The method has been successfully tested by various examples.