Algorithm for simplifying 3d surface?

Question

I have a set of 3d points that approximate a surface. Each point, however, are subject to some error. Furthermore, the set of points contain a lot more points than is actually n

Answer 1

unless you parametrise your surface in some way i'm not sure how you can decide which points carry similar information (and can thus be thrown away).

i guess you can choose a bunch of points at random to get rid of, but that doesn't sound like what you want to do.

maybe points near each other (for some definition of 'near') can be considered to contain similar information, and so reduced to single representatives for each such group.

could you give some more details?