With the rapid development of data acquisition techniques

especially 3D laser scanning

surface models of any object constructed by modeling approaches become more and more elaborated

which result in great amount of data to be stored

and decreasing the speed of processing models.It is necessary to reasonably and effectively compress or simplify the surface model constructed from the original scanned point clouds.Based on the data compression algorithm proposed by Garland

a new algorithm for 3D surface model compression with edge contraction is put forward in this paper.The algorithm uses the rule of quadric error to calculate contraction cost of each edge and control the sequence of edges to be contracted.Half space testing is introduced to judge the validity of edge contraction.With this new algorithm

both the triangular faces at the boundary and in the interior of the surface model are compressed synchronously.Experimental results show that the algorithm can preserve the geometric characteristics of the original surface model at high compression ratio

which effectively guarantees the quality of the compressed surface models.