Salient local visual features for shape-based 3D model retrieval

In this paper, we describe a shape-based 3D model retrieval method based on multi-scale local visual features. The features are extracted from 2D range images of the model viewed from uniformly sampled locations on a view sphere. The method is appearance-based, and accepts all the models that can be rendered as a range image. For each range image, a set of 2D multi-scale local visual features is computed by using the scale invariant feature transform [22] algorithm. To reduce cost of distance computation and feature storage, a set of local features describing a 3D model is integrated into a histogram using the bag-of-features approach. Our experiments using two standard benchmarks, one for articulated shapes and the other for rigid shapes, showed that the methods achieved the performance comparable or superior to some of the most powerful 3D shape retrieval methods.