Abstract: We present a new approach to accelerate collision detection for deformable models. Our formulation applies to all triangulated models and significantly reduces the number of elementary tests between features of the mesh, i.e., vertices, edges and faces. We introduce the notion of Representative-Triangles, standard geometric triangles augmented with mesh feature information and use this representation to achieve better collision query performance. The resulting approach can be combined with bounding volume hierarchies and works well for both inter-object and self-collision detection. We demonstrate the benefit of Representative-Triangles on continuous collision detection for cloth simulation and N-body collision scenarios. We observe up to a one-order of magnitude reduction in feature-pair tests and up to a 5X improvement in query time.