A 3D model retrieval method using 2D freehand sketches

In this paper, a method is proposed to retrieve desired 3D models by measuring the similarity between a user's freehand sketches and 2D orthogonal views generated from 3D models. The proposed method contains three parts: (1) pose determination of a 3D model; (2) 2D orthogonal view generation along the orientations; and (3) similarity measurement between a user's sketches and the 2D views. Users can submit one, two or three views intuitively as a query, which are similar to the three main views in engineering drawing. It is worth pointing point out that our method only needs three views, while 13 views is the minimum set that has been reported by other researchers.