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

There exist several different techniques for point-based surface model simplification, including:

• clustering;
• particle simulation;
• iterative simplification.

See the survey:

M. Pauly, M. Gross, and L. P. Kobbelt. Efficient simplification of point- sampled surfaces. In Proceedings of the conference on Visualization’02, pages 163–170, Washington, DC, 2002. IEEE.