A Survey of Surface Retrieval Techniques for 3D Models

As the amount of new information generated in the world rapidly increases, efficient search in collections of structured data, texts and multimedia objects. 3D objects are an important type of multimedia data with many applications. Recent developments in techniques for modeling, digitizing and visualizing 3D models have led to an increase in the number of available 3D models on the Internet and in domain-specific databases. For visualization, 3D model are represented as a surface, in particular as polygonal meshes. Many researchers have investigated the specific problems of content based 3D shape retrieval and in the related fields of computer vision, object recognition and geometric modeling.