Triangular mesh is widely used in 3D computer vision because meshes can model objects of arbitrary shape and are easily constructed from sensed 3D data. However the number of the triangules in the mesh is often very huge which makes later process lostly. As a result

mesh simplification becomes a hotspot in computer vision.The Mesh simplification of 3D models for computer vision applications should preserve the shape

the topology and other attribute values (e.g. colors

textures

surface normals

edges

etc) of the object

which makes vision systems work effectively in the presentation

description

recognition and understanding of the object. This paper presents a mesh simplification algorithm with texture preservation by applying edge operations (edge collapse

edge split) to the whole surface mesh. The maximum asymmetric distance of the two meshes is computed as the shape change measure and the maximum texture distance of the two vertices in local neighborhood of the edge is computed as the texture change measure. This algorithm can reduce a great number of faces while preserving the object shape

the topology and texture features. The algorithm is also distributing the vertices of the mesh evenly over the surface of the object.