3D model retrieval based on projected area at mesh vertex

The conventional shape feature-based method did not describe the local feature enough. This paper proposed a new 3D model retrieval method based on projected area at mesh vertex. First, sum the projected area on vertical plane of the normal vector at mesh vertex, then normalized the list of the projected area distributions and transfer these data by Fourier transform method. Then the result is defined as 3D model's feature vector which can be used to calculate the similarity of different models. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithm utilizing the Engineering Shape Benchmark (ESB) database. The experiential results show that the proposed methods effectively reflect the similarity among engineering models, and the match result of the models is accurate and the retrieval performance is significantly improved compared to traditional shape distribution method.