3D Shape Retrieval via Irrelevance Filtering and Similarity Ranking (IF/SR)

A novel solution for the content-based 3D shape retrieval problem using an unsupervised clustering approach, which does not need any label information of 3D shapes, is presented in this work. The proposed shape retrieval system consists of two modules in cascade: the irrelevance filtering (IF) module and the similarity ranking (SR) module. The IF module attempts to cluster gallery shapes that are similar to each other by examining global and local features simultaneously. However, shapes that are close in the local feature space can be distant in the global feature space, and vice versa. To resolve this issue, we propose a joint cost function that strikes a balance between two distances. Irrelevant samples that are close in the local feature space but distant in the global feature space can be removed in this stage. The remaining gallery samples are ranked in the SR module using the local feature. The superior performance of the proposed IF/SR method is demonstrated by extensive experiments conducted on the popular SHREC12 dataset.