In order to effectively maintain the significant geometric features of scattered point clouds and improve the accuracy and efficiency of point cloud simplification, a point cloud simplification method based on point importance judgment is proposed. Firstly, the importance of points in point clouds is calculated, and feature points are extracted according to the importance. Then, the octree algorithm is used to simplify the non-feature points, so as to retain the main details of the point cloud and realize the simplification of the point cloud. Finally, the point cloud simplification method is verified by simplifying the data model of public point clouds and cultural relics point clouds. The results show that the point cloud simplification method based on point importance judgment can effectively simplify the point cloud while maintaining the detailed geometric characteristics of the point cloud. It is a fast and high-precision point cloud simplification method.