Simplification of meshes with digitized radiance

International audience; View-dependent surface color of virtual objects can be represented by outgoing radiance of the surface. In this paper we tackle the processing of outgoing radiance stored as a vertex attribute of triangle meshes. Data resulting from an acquisition process can be very large and computationally intensive to render. We show that when reducing the global memory footprint of such acquired objects, smartly reducing the spatial resolution is an effective strategy for overall appearance preservation. Whereas state-of-the-art simplification processes only consider scalar or vectorial attributes , we conversely consider radiance functions defined on the surface for which we derive a metric. For this purpose, several tools are introduced like coherent radiance function interpolation, gradient computation , and distance measurements. Both synthetic and acquired examples illustrate the benefit and the relevance of this radiance-aware simplification process.