A curvature adaptive algorithm is presented to simplify 3d meshes rapidly based on splitting of the parameterization plane. The original 3d mesh is mapped onto the parameterization plane. A planar gray-level distribution is constructed based on the curvature values of the vertices of the original mesh to proclaim the various sampling density requirements of the original mesh. An iteration algorithm is used to select the curvature adaptive resample vertices on the parametcrization plane to construct the simplified mesh. The parameterization plane is iteratively split into two parts with the same summation of the gray-level value in each step. A non-balance binary tree was constructed during the procedure of splitting. The resample vertices set is obtained by allocating one vertex in each leaf node

and those resampled vertices are triangulated to construct the simplified mesh. This algorithm is very fast and can preserve the detail very well.