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A Search Engine for 3D Models
Thomas Funkhouser
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Computer Science, Princeton University:
Thursday, February 13, 2003, 4:30 PM,
Princeton University, Friend Center 006
As the number of 3D models available on the Web grows, there is an
increasing need for a search engine to help people find them (e.g., a
Google for 3D models). Unfortunately, traditional text-based search
techniques are not always effective for 3D data. In this talk, we
investigate new shape-based search methods. A key challenge is to find
a computational representation of shape (a "shape descriptor") that is
concise, robust, quick to compute, efficient to match, and
discriminating between similar and dissimilar shapes. In this talk, I
will describe shape descriptors designed for computer graphics models
commonly found on the Web (i.e., they may contain arbitrary degeneracies
and alignments). We have experimented with them in a Web-based search
engine that allows users to query for 3D models based on similarities to
3D sketches, 3D models, 2D sketches, and/or text keywords. We find our
best shape matching methods provide better precision-recall performance
than related approaches and are fast enough to return query results from
a repository of 20,000 polygonal models in under a second. You can try
them out at: http://shape.cs.princeton.edu .
Joint work with Patrick Min, Michael Kazhdan, Robert Osada, Joyce Chen,
Alex Halderman, David Dobkin, and David Jacobs.
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