Abstract: The decimation of highly detailed meshes has emerged as an important issue in many computer graphics related fields. A whole library of different algorithms has been proposed in the literature. By carefully investigating such algorithms, we can derive a generic structure for mesh reduction schemes which is analogous to a class of greedy-algorithms for heuristic optimization. Particular instances of this algorithmic template allow to adapt to specific target applications. We present a new mesh reduction algorithm which clearly reflects this meta scheme and efficiently generates decimated high quality meshes while observing global error bounds.