Abstract Most of the existing algorithms for simplifying triangular meshes might lose some important shape features of the original model, especially at low levels of the simplified models. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for triangular mesh simplification, which uses the local volume as the cost of decimation based on edge collapse operators. Lots of examples demonstrate that our method is fast, less memory overhead and preserve the details very well. Furthermore, we can easily obtain a set of LOD models by our approach. Key words Mesh simplification; Edge collapse; Level-of-Detail(LOD) ., ,.,, ., LOD . ; ; (LOD)