3-D shape descriptors and distance metrics for content-based artifact retrieval

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.