Neural Mesh Simplification

Despite the advent in rendering, editing and preprocessing methods of 3D meshes, their real-time execution remains still infeasible for large-scale meshes. To ease and accelerate such processes, mesh simplification methods have been introduced with the aim to reduce the mesh resolution while preserving its appearance. In this work we attempt to tackle the novel task of learnable and differentiable mesh simplification. Compared to traditional simplification approaches that collapse edges in a greedy iterative manner, we propose a fast and scalable method that simplifies a given mesh in one-pass. The proposed method unfolds in three steps. Initially, a subset of the input vertices is sampled using a sophisticated extension of random sampling. Then, we train a sparse attention network to propose candidate triangles based on the edge connectivity of the sampled vertices. Finally, a classification network estimates the probability that a candidate triangle will be included in the final mesh. The fast, lightweight and differentiable properties of the proposed method makes it possible to be plugged in every learnable pipeline without introducing a significant overhead. We evaluate both the sampled vertices and the generated triangles under several appearance error measures and compare its performance against several state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, we showcase that the running performance can be up to 10× faster than traditional methods.