An overview of content-based three-dimensional model retrieval methods

Recent advancement in computer hardware and software have led to an increasing amount of 3D models. Furthermore, the rapid development of WWW enables the access to 3D models constructed by people all over the world. This paper surveyed the background, state-of-the-art review and progress of content-based 3D shape retrieval, and analyzed and described several topics, including the preprocessing, coordinates standardization, feature extraction, similarity matching, query interface and existing typical 3D model search engines. Also, we classified the existing 3D shape similarity measures and focus on several 3D model similarity measures. Finally, advantages and disadvantages of these methods are discussed and future works are proposed.