A 3D Model Retrieval Method Using 2D Freehand Sketches,” accepted for

Abstract A method is proposed in this paper to retrieve desired 3D models by measuring the similarity between user’s sketches and 2D orthogonal views generated from 3D models. The proposed method contains three steps: (1) determinate the orientation of 3D model; (2) generate the 2D orthogonal views along the orientations; and (3) measure the similarity between user’s sketches and the 2D views. For these purposes, three respective algorithms are proposed. Users can submit one, two or three views intuitively as a query, which are similar to the three main views in engineering drawing. The weight of each sketch view can be reconfigured by users to emphasize its importance. It is worth to point out that our method only needs three or six views, while 13 views is the minimum set that have been reported by other researchers. A prototype system is developed to evaluate the validity of this proposed method. Key Words: 3D model retrieval, similarity measurement, sketch, user interface