3D CONTENT-BASED SEARCH BASED ON 3D

KRAWTCHOUK MOMENTS
 ABSTRACT

In this paper a novel method for 3D content-based search and retrieval is proposed.
Guided by the imperative need for a reliable 3D content based search tool and the very
interesting results of research work done in the past on the performance of Krawtchouk
moments and Krawtchouk moment invariants in image processing, Weighted 3D Krawtchouk
moments are introduced for efcient 3D analysis which are suitable for content-based search
and retrieval applications. The proposed method was tested on Princeton Shape Benchmark.
Experiments have shown that the proposed method is superior in terms of precision-recall
comparing with other well-known methods reported in the literature.
1. Introduction

3D shape matching has evolved to a wide research area during the last years. At the same time, a variety of emerging
applications, such as CAD and games design, computer animations, manufacturing and molecular biology applica-
tions, dictates the need for efcient 3D search and retrieval tools. Among the several approaches introduced for 3D
shape matching, the most well-known ones are based on low-level geometrical characteristics, which can be effec-
tively extracted from the global shape of a 3D object.
The efcient and simple query-by-content approach has been almost universally adopted in the literature, until
now. Any such method, however, must rst deal with the proper positioning and orientation of the 3D models. The
two common methods for the solution to this problem are the pose normalization, where models are placed in a
normalized coordinate frame, and native descriptor invariance, where the models are described in a transformation
invariant manner. Most of the existing methods for 3D content based search and retrieval, are utilizing the pose
normalization method.

2. Previous Work
Many methods for 3D shape search and retrieval have been presented in the literature. In [1], Kolonias et al.
present a fast query by example approach where the descriptors are properly chosen in order to follow the basic
geometric criteria which humans usually use for the same purpose, as the aspect ratio, the angles and the edges of
critical points, while Ohbuchi et al. [2] present a method based on shape histograms. Three shapes histograms, each
one on each principle axis, are discretely parameterized and used to measure the shape similarity.
Daras et al. [5], propose a 3D search and retrieval method based on Generalized Radon Transform(GRT). Bustos et al.
[6] focus on improving the effectiveness of similarity search in 3D object repositories from a system-oriented
perspective and propose a heuristic selection, called purity, for choosing retrieval methods based on query-dependent
characteristics. Zaharia [7] introduces a new shape descriptor, the Canonical 3D Hough Transform Descriptor which
is topologically stable, but not invariant to geometric transformations.
In [8] topology matching is proposed as an interesting and intricate technique. However, the small-scale application
eld of the method makes it unable to face up general purpose 3D model databases. The MPEG group has proposed
[9] the shape spectrum descriptor, which is dened as the histogram of the shape index, calculated over the 3D
objects surface. Novotni and Klein [12] exploit and extend 3D Zernike moments introduced by Canterakis [13], for
3D searching. Zernike moments are based on Zernike polynomials and are afne invariants inside the unitary sphere.
Suzuki [14] proposes a 3D shape descriptor which is invariant under 90 degrees rotations around coordinate axis.
Funkhouser et al. [10] developed a web-based 3D search and retrieval system. The system is capable of indexing large
repository of computer graphics models, querying based on text keywords, 3D sketches, 2D sketches and 3D models.
The matching algorithm utilizes the spherical harmonics to compute similarities, without a pose normaliza tion to be
needed. In [11] Kazhdan et al. present a tool for transforming rotation dependent spherical and voxel shape descriptors
into rotation invariant ones. The main idea of this approach is to describe a spherical function in terms of the amount
of energy it contains at different frequencies. The results indicate that spherical harmonic representation improves the
performance of most of the descriptors.

In [15], Vranic considers 3D-shape descriptors generated by using functions on a sphere. The descriptors are
engaged for retrieving polygonal mesh models. Rotation invariance of descriptors achieved with PCA or by dening
features in which the invariance exists. A new rotation invariant feature vector based on functions on concentric
spheres, that outperformed all recently proposed descriptors is dened and two approaches for achieving rotation
invariance as well as options to use a single function or several functions on concentric spheres to generate feature
vectors are compared.
In [16], Chen et al. propose a visual similarity-based 3D model retrieval system. The main idea is that if two
3Dmodels are similar, they also look similar from all viewing angles and a hundred orthogonal projections of every
object are encoded using Zernike moments and Fourier descriptors. The visual similarity-based approach is robust
against similarity transformation, noise and model degeneracy, and provided better performance in terms of precision-
recall diagram than many other approaches.

The major drawback of the native invariant methods (those methods that does not ?appose? the normalization step)
is a loss in discriminative power. For example, spherical harmonics and 3D Zernike moments achieve rotation
invariance by computing the Euclidean norm of descriptor vectors, which results in loss in discriminative power. On
the other hand, methods utilizing the pose normalization step, can generally result in a description of the object that
contains highly discriminative information. However, most of the proposed methods, require either high preprocessing
or process time, or very large amount of memory and stored data. In addition, there is no normalization method robust
for 3D content-based search and retrieval. Two methods have been proposed for pose normalization, the Principal
Component Analysis (PCA) and an afne normalization method proposed by Canterakis [13]. However, the mathe-
matical structure of the latter method suffers from a per-axis scaling step which produces misshaped objects,
unsuitable for 3D content-based search applications.

In this paper, a novel compact method suitable for efcient 3D content-based search, is proposed. Guided by the very
interesting results of Krawtchouk moments in image processing [20], the Weighted 3D Krawtchouk moments are
introduced. Given a 3D object as input, the Weighted 3D Krawtchouk moments are computed, which are then used as
a descriptor vector. In this way, a very compact description of a 3D object in the form of a highly discriminative de
scriptor vector is achieved. The descriptor extraction is very fast and the matching process, one-to-all, for a single
object in a medium size database can be completed in few seconds. The method is not invariant under geometrical
transformation, thus for every query 3D model a preprocessing pose and position normalization step is required.
However, in this paper, the assumption that the rotation and orientation problems are solved has been made. The
advantages of Weighted 3D Krawtchouk moments for 3D model analysis derived from their denition. Weighted 3D
Krawtchouk moments are based on Weighted Krawtchouk polynomials which are dened on the discrete eld; hence,
no error is inserted during the moment computation due to discretization. In addition, lower order Weighted
Krawtchouk polynomials have relatively high spatial frequency components. Therefore, the Weighted 3D Krawtchouk
moments have the ability to represent edges more effectively with lower order moments and the computed descriptor
vectors have the ability to capture more information retaining a low dimensionality and thus producing better retrieval
results.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 3 the Weighted 3D Krawtchouk Moments are introduced in terms of
Weighted Krawtchouk polynomials. Computational aspects of Krawtchouk Moments are presented in Section 4 while
in Section 5 the matching method is described. In Section 6 the experimental results evaluating the proposed method
and comparing it with other methods are presented. Finally conclusions are drawn in Section 7.

3. Extraction Of Krawtchouk Descriptors

In this section, the mathematical background needed for the introduction of Weighted 3D Krawtchouk moments is
presented. Then, the Weighted 3D Krawtchouk moments are introduced. The background of Krawtchouk polynomials
presented below can be also found in [20].

3.1. Simple Krawtchouk Polynomials

Krawtchouk moments are based on a set of orthonormal polynomials, associated with the binomial distribution, in-
troduced by Mikhail Krawtchouk almost 80 years ago. More recent approaches expressed Krawtchouk polynomials in
terms of hypergeometric function [17, 18].