Shape-similarity search of three-dimensional models using parameterized statistics

In this paper, we propose a method for shape-similarity search of 3D polygonal-mesh models. The system accepts triangular meshes, but tolerates degenerated polygons, disconnected component, and other anomalies. As the feature vector, the method uses a combination of three vectors, (1) the moment of inertia, (2) the average distance of surface from the axis, and (3) the variance of distance of the surface from the axis. Values in each vector are discretely parameterized along each of the three principal axes of inertia of the model. We employed the Euclidean distance and the elastic-matching distance as the measures of distance between pairs of feature vectors. Experiments showed that the proposed shape features and distance measures perform fairly well in retrieving models having similar shape from a database of VRML models.