Design, implementation, and evaluation of the surface mesh data structure

Abstract

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of an efficient and easy to use data structure for polygon surface meshes. The design choices that arise during development are systematically investigated and detailed reasons for choosing one alternative over another are given. We describe our implementation and compare it to other contemporary mesh data structures in terms of usability computational performance, and memory consumption. Our evaluation demonstrates that our new Surfacemesh data structure is easier to use, offers higher performance, and consumes less memory than several state-of-the-art mesh data structures.