Interactive 3-D Shape Retrieval System Using the Attributed Relational Graph

Abstract

One of the issues in 3-D shape retrieval arises from the fact that users suffer inherent difficulty in generating a 3-D query. Therefore, the demands on the user-friendly querying interface such as query by sketch and query by editing are increasing. In this paper, we propose a new shape retrieval system using the attributed relational graph (ARG) composed of nodes with unary attributes and edges with binary relations for interactive searching and comparing 3-D objects. As similar to other systems, the ARG-based retrieval system consists of two components: the ARG generation via feature extraction and its similarity matching. For the ARG generation, we adopt a morphological shape decomposition scheme as a part-based representation. More specifically, the part-based representation can be generated from the decomposition result and encoded into the ARG. In the case of similarity matching, we consider various ARG matching algorithms such as earth mover's distance, spectral analysis, relaxation and modified nested earth mover's distance. Finally, we have conducted the experiments for the ARG with various matching algorithms and the Shape3D, i.e.an international standard for description and browsing of 3-D object database in MPEG-7, using the database of 480 3-D objects with 33 categories in terms of the bull's eye performance, the average normalized modified retrieval rate, and the precision/recall curve.