3D Object Retrieval based on Resulting Fields

D object search and retrieval has become a very challenging research field over the last years with application in many areas like computer vision, car industry, medicine, etc. All approaches that have been proposed so far are based on the analysis of the shape of the 3D object, either concerning its surface or its volume. In this paper, a completely different approach is followed: Instead of extracting features from the 3D object, its shape's "impact" on the surrounding area is examined. This impact is expressed by considering the 3D object voxels as electric point charges and computing the resulting electrostatic field in a neighborhood around it. The proposed approach ensures robustness with respect to object's degeneracies and native invariance under rotation and translation. Experiments which were performed in a 3D object databases proved that the proposed method can be efficiently used for 3D object retrieval applications.