A novel sketch-based 3D model retrieval method by integrating skeleton graph and contour feature

Abstract

With the rapid growth of 3D models on the Web, effective methods to retrieve appropriate 3D models are becoming crucial. In this paper, we propose a novel sketch-based 3D model retrieval approach which integrates the skeleton graph and contour feature. Skeleton graph represents the topology structure of the query sketch as well as representative 2D views of 3D models, and contour feature captures their detailed information. Moreover, A hierarchical coarse-to-fine searching strategy is employed in this method. Firstly, a skeleton graph based matching method is used to eliminate those 3D models which are dissimilar to the query sketch. Then, the selected candidate models are refined by measuring the similarity of their contour feature. In addition, we adopt a graph transduction method to improve the ranking order of the retrieved 3D models. The proposed method was tested on the public sketch benchmarks and compared with other leading sketch-based 3D model retrieval methods. The experiment results demonstrate that our approach can accurately retrieve desired 3D models for users and has a superior performance to other state-of-the-art approaches.