Algorithm for simplifying 3d surface?

Question

I have a set of 3d points that approximate a surface. Each point, however, are subject to some error. Furthermore, the set of points contain a lot more points than is actually n

Answer 1

Google for Hugues Hoppe and his "surface reconstruction" work.

Surface reconstruction is used to find a meshed surface to fit the point cloud; however, this method yields lots of triangles. You can then apply mesh a reduction technique to reduce the polygon count in a way to minimize error. As an example, you can look at OpenMesh's decimation methods.

OpenMesh

Hugues Hoppe