Comparison of triangle strips algorithms

Triangle surface models belong to the most popular type of geometric objects description in computer graphics. Therefore, the problem of fast visualization of this type of data is often solved. One popular approach is stripification, i.e., a conversion of a triangulated object surface into strips of triangles. This enables a reduction of the rendering time by reducing the data size which avoids redundant lighting and transformation computations. The problem of finding an optimal decomposition of triangle surface models to a set of strips is NP-hard and there exist a lot of different heuristic stripification techniques. This paper should help to orient in the jungle of stripification algorithms. We present an overview of existing stripification methods and detailed description of several important stripification methods for fully triangulated meshes. As different authors usually use different data sets and different architectures, it is nearly impossible to compare the quality of stripification methods. For this reason we also present a set of tests of these methods to give the reader a better possibility to compare these methods. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]