Abstract: This paper discusses an efficient and effective framework to decompose polygon meshes into components. This is useful in various interactive graphics applications, such as, mesh editing, establishing correspondence between objects for morphing, computation of bounding volume hierarchy for collision detection and ray tracing. In this paper, we formalize the notion of a component as a sub-volume of an object with homogeneous geometric and topological features. Next, we describe the proposed framework, which adapts the idea of edge contraction and space sweeping to decompose an object automatically. Finally, we demonstrate an application of this framework to improve bounding volume hierarchies constructed by state-of-the-art collision detection systems such as RAPID and QuickCD.