The work in this thesis concerns structural analysis of 2-manifold triangular meshes, and their processing towards quality enhancement (remeshing) or simplification. In existing work, the repositioning of mesh vertices necessary for remeshing is either done locally or globally, but in the latter case without local control on the introduced geometrical error. Therefore, current results are either not globally optimal or introduce unwanted geometrical error. Other promising remeshing and approximation techniques are based on a decomposition into simple geometrical primitives (planes, cylinders, spheres etc.), but they generally fail to find the best decomposition, i.e. the one which jointly optimizes the residual geometrical error as well as the number and type of selected simple primitives. To tackle the weaknesses of existing remeshing approaches, we propose a method based on a global model, namely a probabilistic graphical model integrating soft constraints based on geometry (approximation error), mesh quality and the number of mesh vertices. In the same manner, for segmentation purposes and in order to improve algorithms delivering decompositions into simple primitives, a probabilistic graphical modeling has been chosen. The graphical models used in this work are Markov Random Fields, which allow to find an optimal configuration by a global minimization of an objective function. We have proposed three contributions in this thesis about 2-manifold triangular meshes : (i) a statistically robust method for feature edge extraction for mechanical objects, (ii) an algorithm for the segmentation into regions which are approximated by simple primitives, which is robust to outliers and to the presence of noise in the vertex positions, (iii) and lastly an algorithm for mesh optimization which jointly optimizes triangle quality, the quality of vertex valences, the number of vertices, as well as the geometrical fidelity to the initial surface.