Algorithms for 2D polygon simplification by collapsing segments?
<p>Recently I've been looking into some different methods of polygon simplification.</p>

<p>Popular methods include <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramer%E2%80%93Douglas%E2%80%93Peucker_algorithm" rel="nofollow">Ramer-Douglas-Peucker path simplification</a> algorithm &amp; <a href="https://bost.ocks.org/mike/simplify/" rel="nofollow">Visvalingam</a>, while they are both good algorithms, in some cases gives poor results by only ever removing points, never placing points in new locations <em>(both a pro and a con depending on the usage)</em>.</p>

<p>I've been looking into using a simplified segment collapsing method, common for 3D geometry, see: <a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=258849" rel="nofollow">Surface simplification using quadric error metrics</a>.</p>

<p>From some quick tests this works reasonably well, however I suspect this isn't all that novel, possibly there are better methods for 2D polygons too.</p>

<p>I also looked into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrace" rel="nofollow">PO-Trace</a>'s method of polygon simplification, which is excellent, but focused on simplifying polygons extracted from bitmap images.</p>

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<p>Are there well known algorithms for polygon simplification using segment collapsing?</p>

<p><em>Asking because I'm about to write my own function that uses quadric error metrics, but suspect this may exist already, possibly named differently.</em></p>

<p><em>If not, I'll link the code once its done.</em></p>