Boosting 3D object retrieval by object flexibility

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel feature, called object flexibility, at a point of a 3D object to describe how the neighborhood of this point is massively connected to the object. We show that this feature is stable to the deformation of objects' articulations, in addition to commonly concerned linear transforms, i.e., translation, scale, and rotation. A shape descriptor is obtained based on this feature using the bag-of-words model. As an application, the descriptor is used to perform 3D object retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superiority over a variety of existing 3D shape descriptors in the retrieval of articulated objects, as well as its enhancement of other shape descriptors to retrieve generic 3D objects. Copyright 2009 ACM.