| This work presents a method for quantifying important form cues in 2D polygonal models. These cues are derived from multi-scale medial analysis, and they also draw upon several new form analysis methods developed in this work. Among these new methods are a means of using the Blum Medial Axis Transform for stable computing, a method to decompose objects into a set of parts that includes the ambiguity we find in human perception of objects, and the simultaneous application of both internal and external medial representations of objects. These techniques are combined to create a local saliency measure, a global saliency measure and a measure of object complexity.; This work also demonstrates a new approach to simplifying complex polygonal models in order to accelerate interactive rendering. I propose that simplifying a model's form, based on how it is perceived and processed by the human visual system, offers the potential for more effective simplifications. In this research, I suggest a means of understanding object simplification in these perceptual terms by creating a perceptually based scheduling of simplification operations as well as perceptual measures of the degree of simplification and the visual similarity between a simplified object and its original. A new simplification scheme is based on these measures, and then this perceptual scheme is compared via examples to a geometric simplification method. |
