A method and apparatus for the formation of a simplified model. A computer system comprises a simplification system. The simplification system receives a plurality of components from a complex model, determines a number of moments of inertia for each component of the plurality of components, and creates a simplified model using the number of moments of inertia for the each component of the plurality of components, wherein the complex model is a three-dimensional computer model.

An architecture for linear-time extraction of maximally stable extremal regions (MSERs) having an image memory, heap memory, a pointer array and processing hardware is disclosed. The processing hardware is configured to in real-time analyze image pixels in the image memory using a linear-time algorithm to identify a plurality of components of the image. The processing hardware is also configured to place the image pixels in the heap memory for each of the plurality of components of the image, generate a pointer that points to a location in the heap memory that is associated with a start of flooding for another component and store the pointer in the array of pointers. The processing hardware is also configured to access the plurality of components using the array of pointers and determine MSER ellipses based on the components and MSER criteria.