| description abstract | Building models, characterized by their expansive scale and intricate assembly of components, often possess inherently complex geometric forms. Efficiently accessing such models on low-resource hardware such as netbooks and mobile devices remains a significant technical challenge. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel appearance-driven building mesh simplification approach, building mesh simplification with differential rendering (BMS-DR), which is designed to yield visually consistent low-polygonal building meshes with enhanced textures. Upon receiving a building mesh model as input, the proposed method proceeds in a two-stage process: initially, an approximate building envelope is constructed through techniques including three-dimensional (3D) alpha-shaped hull construction, edge collapse, and UV unwrapping. Then, the geometry and texture of this envelope are refined through the application of differentiable rendering, forming the final low-polygon count model. For extensive evaluation, this paper introduces a novel Blinn–Phong function-based visual error metric and presents a data set comprising 134 distinct building mesh models exhibiting a variety of architectural styles. The experimental results demonstrated that BMS-DR performed well across all building models featuring apertures and recesses, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods in multiple visual quality metrics. This paper proposes a novel appearance-driven building mesh simplification approach named building mesh simplification with differential rendering (BMS-DR), which is designed to generate visually consistent low-polygonal building meshes with textures. Upon receiving a textured building mesh model issued from a modeling software and the required simplification rate as input, the proposed method is able to produce a corresponding low-polygon count model and associated textures in an offline manner. BMS-DR was evaluated with different visual error metrics and validated on a data set comprising 134 distinct building mesh models. BMS-DR can be integrated or built as a standalone package for BIM- or city information modeling (CIM)-related graphical applications, and it can bring performance gains when dealing with large textured mesh models or model groups. | |
