Microshapes: Efficient Querying of 3D Object Collections based on Local Shape

Abstract

Content-based querying of 3D object collections has the intrinsic difficulty of creating the query object and previous approaches have concentrated in producing global simplifications such as sketches. In contrast, in this paper, the concept of querying 3D object collections based on local shape is introduced. Microshapes are very promising in terms of generality and applicability and is based on a variation of the spin image descriptor. This descriptor uses intersection counts to determine the presence of boundaries in the support volume. These boundaries can be used to recognise local shape similarity. Queries based on this descriptor are general, easy to specify and robust to geometric clutter.