Interactive 3-D Shape Retrieval System Using the Attributed Relational Graph

One of the issues in 3-D shape retrieval arises from the fact that users suffer inherent difficulty in generating a 3-D query. Therefore, the demands on the user-friendly querying interface such as query by sketch and query by editing are increasing. In this paper, we propose a new shape retrieval system using the attributed relational graph (ARG) composed of nodes with unary attributes and edges with binary relations for interactive searching and comparing 3-D objects. As similar to other systems, the ARG-based retrieval system consists of two components: the ARG generation via feature extraction and its similarity matching. For the ARG generation, we adopt a morphological shape decomposition scheme as a part-based representation. More specifically, the part-based representation can be generated from the decomposition result and encoded into the ARG. In the case of similarity matching, we consider various ARG matching algorithms such as earth mover´s distance, spectral analysis, relaxation and modified nested earth mover´s distance. Finally, we have conducted the experiments for the ARG with various matching algorithms and the Shape3D, i.e.an international standard for description and browsing of 3-D object database in MPEG-7, using the database of 480 3-D objects with 33 categories in terms of the bull´s eye performance, the average normalized modified retrieval rate, and the precision/recall curve.