Mesh simplification is an important research topic in scientific visualization and virtual reality. The detail characters are important parts of an object model and the vertex normal is one kind of characteristic representations. In order to preserve the detail characteristics in mesh simplification

the discrete curvature of curves is introduced to the method based on quadric error metric (QEM) in this paper. In addition

the average triangle normal is used as the vertex normal in order to get a better visual effect. The experimental result shows that the proposed method can maintain more object features at the same decimation rate as QEM method

while keeping a good visual effect.