The growing number of large multimedia collections has led to an increased interest in content-based retrieval research. Applications of content-based techniques to image retrieval is an active research area but much less work has been reported on content-based retrieval of 3-D objects in a multimedia database context. Increasingly such objects are being captured and added to multimedia collections and the European project, SCULPTEUR, is developing a museum information system which includes the introduction of facilities for content-based retrieval of the 3-D representations. This paper provides a comparison and evaluation of a range of 3-D shape descriptors and distance metrics which have been introduced into the SCULPTEUR project to demonstrate their use for content-based retrieval applications. Results show that while particular descriptors and distance metrics provide good overall performance, it can be more appropriate to choose different descriptors for different search tasks.

Date Published: 17 January 2005
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 5682, Storage and Retrieval Methods and Applications for Multimedia 2005, (17 January 2005); doi: 10.1117/12.588585

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5682:
Storage and Retrieval Methods and Applications for Multimedia 2005
Rainer W. Lienhart; Noboru Babaguchi; Edward Y. Chang, Editor(s)