Merging faces: A new orthogonal simplification of solid models

A new approach to simplify orthogonal pseudo-polyhedra (OPP) and binary volumes is presented. The method is incremental and produces a level-of-detail (LOD) sequence of OPP. Any object of this sequence contains the previous objects and, therefore, it is a bounding orthogonal approximation of them. The sequence finishes with the minimum axis-aligned bounding box (AABB). OPP are represented by the Extreme Vertices Model, a complete model that stores a subset of their vertices and performs fast Boolean operations. Simplification is achieved using a new approach called merging faces, which relies on the application of 2D Boolean operations. We also present a technique, based on the model continuity, for a better shape preservation. The method has been tested with several datasets and compared with two similar methods.