Mesh retrieval by components

This paper examines the application of the human vision theories of Marr and Biederman to the retrieval of three-dimensional objects. The key idea is to represent an object by an attributed graph that consists of the object's meaningful components as nodes, where each node is fit to a basic shape. A system that realizes this approach was built and tested on a database of about 400 objects and achieves promising results. It is shown that this representation of 3D objects is very compact. Moreover, it gives rise to a retrieval algorithm that is invariant to non-rigid transformations and does not require normalization.