摘要：This paper proposes a new method to simplify mesh in 3D terrain. The 3D terrain is presented by digital elevation model. First, Laplace operator is introduced to calculate sharp degree of mesh point, which indicates the variation trend of the terrain. Through setting a critical value of sharp degree, feature points are selected. Second, critical mesh points are extracted by an recursive process, and constitute the simplified mesh. Third, the algorithm of linear-square interpolation is employed to restore the characteris- tics of the terrain. Last, the terrain is rendered with color and texture. The experimental results demonstrate that this method can compress data by 16% and the error is lower than 10%.