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. Proposed in this paper is a novel algorithm for triangular mesh simplification, which uses the local volume as the cost of decimation based on edge collapse operators. Many examples demonstrate that the method proposed is fast, requires less memory overhead and preserves the details very well. Furthermore, A set of LOD models by this approach are also easily obtained.