Selective refinement of progressive meshes using vertex hierarchies

This paper presents a general method for selectively refining or coarsening progressive meshes. Our method works for arbitrary meshes, deals with nonmanifolds, and allows the change of manifold and genus properties of the mesh. We introduce new definitions for edge contraction and expansion operations, which make solely use of the vertex hierarchy. These definitions in conjunction with their legal conditions lead to many provable properties of the refinement process. In addition, we propose a local re-stripping method to dynamically