Augmented Reeb Graphs for Content-based Retrieval of 3D Mesh Models

Tony Tung and Francis Schmitt

Signal and Image Processing Department, CNRS UMR 5141
Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications
46, rue Barrault, 75634 Paris Cedex 13, France
{tony.tung, francis.schmitt}@enst.fr

Abstract quisition sequences of the object, are not well adapted to 3D

This article presents an improved method of 3D mesh mod-
els indexing for content-based retrieval in database with
shape similarity and appearance queries. The approach
is based on the Multiresolutional Reeb Graph matching
presented in [1]. The original method only takes into ac-
count topological information what is often not sufficient
for effective matchings. Therefore we proposed to augment
this graph with geometrical attributes. We also provide a
new topological coherence condition to improve the graph
matching. Moreover 2D appearance attributes and 3D fea-
tures are extracted and merged to improve the estimation
of the similarity between models. Besides, all these new
attributes are user-dependent as they can be weighted by
variable terms. We obtain a flexible multiresolutional and
multicriteria representation called Augmented Reeb Graph
(ARG). Good preliminary results have been obtained in
a shape-based matching framework compared to existing
methods based only on statistical measures. In addition,
our study lead us to an innovative part matching scheme
based on the same approach as our Augmented Reeb Graph
matching.
1. Introduction
The development of new 3D applications has become
easier and tend to generalise due to the permanent progress
of numerical technologies. Database of 3D objects has
begun to proliferate for multimedia applications [23, 24,
25, 26] as well as for more industrial ones such as in
CAD (e.g. motorcar companies). 3D objects indexing and
content-based search appear as a natural answer for those
who want to navigate in such huge database. As a conse-
quence, queries have to be adapted to this new kind of data.
Scientific literature only presents few methods dealing with
3D shape similarity queries. The techniques derived from
the 2D, such as colour histogram or texture distribution
taken from texture maps or from colour images of the ac-
queries. The approaches such as curvatures histograms [8]
or EGI (Extended Gaussian Image) and its variants [9, 10]
describe too locally the geometry of the objects. As a matter
of fact they do not keep any topological information (mesh
connectivity) and are highly sensitive to mesh modifications
(noise on vertices position, decimation, etc...). In the other
hand, global approaches such as cords histograms [5] or
shape distributions [6] works quite well for the matching
of primitive shapes but produce a too coarse description of
the 3D objects shape to be a sharp retrieval tool when com-
paring similar complex shapes. Similar comments can be
done for the Fourier based descriptors and moments cal-
culations [3, 7]. To obtain an intuitive description of the
shapes, the use of a skeletal or graph representation is very
attractive. These approaches permit us to keep the topology
of the objects which is a rich information for matching pur-
pose. Unfortunately, difficulties lies in the construction of
the skeleton which is either time consuming, too sensitive
to noise on the shape surface, or need a source point which
favour a direction. Besides, most of the time no matching
scheme is provided [11, 12, 13], or no multiresolutional ap-
proach [14, 15, 16] whom the properties are useful for ac-
curate similarity calculations and for various applications as
presented in this article. The Multiresolutional Reeb Graph
(MRG) [1] appears to be a very promising starting point of
research, in particular because it is an efficient mean to ex-
ploit different techniques and merge the features as we will
show in the next sections. The Reeb Graph of a 3D object
is represented by a unidimensional skeleton. It is built us-
ing a function µ defined over the object surface considered
as a compact manifold, and therefore relies on the mesh
connectivity. The graph is robust in case of mesh modifica-
tion thanks to the assumed integral function over the whole
object [1]. The surface of the object is divided in regions
according to value intervals of µ, and a node is associated
to each connected component of the regions. The graph
structure is then obtained by linking the nodes of the con-
nected regions. Afterwards the MRG is constructed hier-
archically from the finest level of resolution to the coarsest
level. And similarity calculation between MRG are done
from the coarsest level to the finest level. Keeping the ad-
vantages of the multiresolutional representation offers by
the MRG, we have provided topological, geometrical and
visual (colour and texture) informations to the node graphs
to obtain a hierarchical description of the models, which is
both global and local and is called Augmented Reeb Graph
(ARG). Therefore the 3D objects indexing in database will
consist on coding in feature vectors the information associ-
ated to the nodes of the Reeb graphs. Tests of shape based
retrieval were performed upon a database of high resolution
3D models [22, 23] and preliminary experiments were per-
formed concerning the application of part matching.
The MRG construction is presented in the next section.
The graph matching procedure and the choice of the nodes
attributes are shown in Section 3. Section 4 deals with
the similarity calculation. The part matching scheme is
presented in Section 5, and the results performed on our
database are described in Section 6. We conclude in Sec-
tion 7 with a discussion about the possible improvement of
the methods.
2. Multiresolutional Reeb Graph overview
According to the Morse theory, a continuous function
defined on a closed surface characterise the topology of the
surface on its critical points [2]. Therefore, a Reeb graph
can be obtained assuming a function µ calculated over the
3D object surface. The multiresolutional aspect results from
the dichotomic discretization of the function values and
from the hierarchical collection of Reeb graphs defined at
each resolution.
2.1. The function µ
Our study concerns objects which are 3D compact man-
ifold meshes of triangles with vertices located in a Carte-
sian frame R(x, y, z). The authors of [15] present different
continuous functions which can be used for the Reeb graph
construction (cf. Figure 1). Assuming a point v(x, y, z) on
the surface S of an object, the height function µ defined
as µ(v(x, y, z)) = z is well adapted for elongated stand
models as human representations. This function is easy to
compute but by definition has a strong orientation depen-
dence. Therefore it is not suited for objects for which the
points dispersal is perpendicular to the axis z. The function
µ defined as the geodesic distance from curvature extrema
is based on growing regions associated to local Gaussian
curvatures on seed vertices. The results highly depend on
the position of the seeds and require the local curvature cal-
culation which is not obvious on every objects, especially
those coming from the Internet. The function defined as the
distance of a surface point v to the centre of mass G of the
object µ(v) = d(G, v), where d is the Euclidean distance,
is easy to calculate and stable to small noise. In the other
hand, this function provides a Reeb Graph which is not flex-
ible enough for our study, as explained next. The chosen
Figure 1. Example of µ functions: height func-
tion (left), distance to centre of mass (middle),
geodesic distance integral (right).
function µ in [1] has rotation invariance property and is de-
fined as the sum of the geodesic distance g(v, p) from v to
the others points {p|p ∈ S}:
Z
µ(v) = g(v, p)dS.
p∈S
The authors [1] chose to normalise the function with
maxp∈S µ(p) for the denominator. To exploit the full dy-
namic of µ(v) over [0, 1], we have normalised the function
with its min and max values:
µ(v) − minp∈S µ(p)
µN (v) = .
maxp∈S µ(p) − minp∈S µ(p)
The Reeb graph is obtained by partitioning the object sur-
face following regular intervals of µ values, and linking the
connected regions to each other. In each interval, a node
is associated to a set of connected triangles (cf. Figure 2).
Based on geodesic distance calculation, the resulting Reeb
graph of a human model with arms lifted up in the air and
a human model with arms along the body will look similar
as maximal values of µ stay at the extremity of the arms.
On the other hand, the function µ defined as the distance to
the centre of mass will lead to a different graph. As a mat-
ter of fact, it can be stated that the choice of the function µ
depends on the user’s queries.
2.2. Multiresolutional aspect
A graph of double or half resolution is respectively ob-
tained by the division or the fusion of nodes [1]. A parent
node generates n children nodes with n ≥ 1 at a higher
level of resolution (cf. Figure 3).

Figure 2. Reeb graph: 3D model (left), function µN
(middle), Reeb graph; edges in green; nodes in
red (right) (model from [23]).
Figure 3. MRG construction by merging µN inter-
vals. Nodes from a level of resolution r merge in
parent nodes at a higher level of resolution (from
left to right: r = 2, 1 and 0).
3. Augmented Reeb Graph matching
The matching strategy of two MRGs is based on the
detection of nodes with similar topological configurations
in term of connections to their neighbours nodes and par-
ents/children relations. The aim is to maximise the number
of corresponding nodes. For this purpose a set of topolog-
ical consistency criteria were stated. The pairs of nodes
which verify the criteria are candidates for the matching.
And a loss function determines the best matching nodes
among the candidates. To improve the matching of the orig-
inal MRG method, we have introduced an additive topolog-
ical consistency criteria and added geometrical attributes to
the nodes. Finally a function estimates the similarity be-
tween the two Augmented Reeb Graphs.
3.1. Addititional topological consistency
We consider the graph comparison of two objects M and
N . Topological consistency criteria permit to find the pairs
of nodes (m, n), with m ∈ MRG(M ) and n ∈ MRG(N ),
which could possibly be matched afterwards in the proce-
dure. The nodes m and n are topologically consistent if:
• the parents of m and n have been matched at the pre-
vious level of resolution
• m and n are in the same interval of the function µN
• m and n have the same labels, meaning they both be-
long to branches which have been matched to each
other. In deed, when two nodes are matched, a same
label is propagated along the branches they belong
to. Therefore neighbouring nodes belonging to a same
branch have the same labels. In this way, we ensure
that a branch is entirely matched to a branch [1].
It is also assumed that a node can be matched to a group
of topologically consistent nodes [1]. However the simple
statement of these criteria is not sufficient to ensure that two
branches will still be matched together when the resolution
gets higher (cf. Figure 4). As a consequence, we add a
new topological consistency criterion: if the parents of the
neighbours of m and n have been matched, then they must
have been matched together.
Figure 4. Matching nodes (left). At a higher level
of resolution, branches mixing can happened. To
avoid this, the matching of the parents of the
neighbours have to be tested (right).
3.2. Geometrical attributes
From a topological point of view, the matching of the
graphs could be acceptable. But in our framework these
matching are not well adapted, because topologically speak-
ing an arm worth a leg (they are limbs linked to the body),
whereas we would like to get more accuracy in the match-
ing to efficiently compare complex 3D models.
The topological consistency criteria are such defined that if
two nodes are not matched together at the coarsest level of
resolution, whereas they should be, then there is no chance
that their children nodes will be matched together at a finer
resolution. Therefore it is crucial that nodes are matched the
best they can from the beginning of the consistency tests.
For this reason, we propose to provide localisation infor-
mation to the nodes. A node m is associated to a set of
connected triangles, so it can be located at their barycen-
tric position (cf. Figures 2 and 3). We choose a spherical
coordinate representation (r, θ, ϕ):
 • r(m) ≥ 0 is the distance to the node at the centre of
the frame,
• θ(m) = arctan xy ∈ [− π2 , π2 ],


• ϕ(m) = arccos zr ∈ [0, π].


Using the example of a human model (cf. Figure 5) whom
the axis x would get from the bottom to the top of the body,
axis y oriented from left to right and axis z from behind to
front, we can observe that θ allows to identify the left from
the right, ϕ distinguish arms from legs and r could be de-
cisive in a ambiguous configuration (an arm up in the air
could be taken as an head). It becomes necessary that ob-
Figure 5. Nodes located in spherical coordinates
(model from [23]).
jects are oriented towards the principal directions (x, y, z).
For this purpose, we decide either to use the natural axis of
the object centred to the centre of mass with a coordinates
normalisation, or to apply a classical spatial alignment tech-
nique such as the Principal Component Analysis to turn the
object towards the principal axis [3].
3.3. The loss function
The loss function loss(m, n) quantifies the difference
between two nodes m and n. It is applied on every groups
of topologically consistent nodes and returns those which
will be effectively matched by minimising the function:
loss(m, n) = αl · |a(m) − a(n)| + βl · |l(m) − l(n)|+
γl · |r(m) − r(n)| + δl · |θ(m) − θ(n)| + l · |ϕ(m) − ϕ(n)|.
a is the relative area of the set of triangles associated to a
node. l stands for the complexity of a node and is linked
to the number of its children as described in [1]. αl , βl , γl ,
δl and l are weighting terms which influence the attributes
according to the type of desired queries. This aspect gives
lots of freedom to the matching of nodes. Associated to the
chosen function µ defined as the integral of geodesic dis-
tance, the flexibility of the method can be illustrated by the
possibility to choose either to match models having exactly
the same shapes, or to let more freedom by allowing the
matching between approximative similar shapes (typically
two human models in different positions). And this can be
done by simply adapting the weighting terms to the desired
queries. Besides, it is also possible to replace the absolute
values used to calculate the differences by quadratic dis-
tances, or any other dedicated functions to emphasise the
differences or similarities between two nodes.
Figure 6 shows the gain obtained in the matching of two
graphs by introducing the localisation information in the
nodes.
Figure 6. Left: without geometrical information,
legs can be matched with arms as there are topo-
logically equivalent (blue links denote matching
nodes). Right: by adding geometrical informa-
tion, arms and legs are well matched (models from
[23]).
4. Similarity calculation
Assuming known the list of matching nodes, a function
is required to measure the similarity between two 3D mod-
els. First, a function calculates the similarity between each
matched nodes. The original function introduced by [1]
has been enriched with various features extracted from the
mesh models. Using the same approach as in Section 3.2
for the geometrical attributes, these 2D/3D extracted fea-
tures are weighted to allow different types of queries and to
significantly refine the similarity calculus between two ob-
jects. This results in the Augmented Reeb Graph represen-
tation. The next sections present the proposed nodes simi-
larity function, the introduced 2D/3D object features (rela-
tive volume, cords lengths, curvatures and colour) and the
resulting graphs similarity function.
4.1. Similarity of nodes
The calculation of the similarity function between two
nodes m and n is defined as in [1] :
sim(m, n) = αs ·min(a(m), a(n))+βs ·min(l(m), l(n)).
To improve the retrieval of similar objects with more flex-
ible queries and a larger set of global and local character-
istics we introduce the following geometric and visual fea-
tures extracted from the section of the object associated to
each node m and at each level of resolution:
• v(m), the relative volume associated to m,
• cords(m), a statistic measure of the extent of the sur-
face region associated to m,
• curvm (m) and curvg (m), a statistic of the mean and
Gaussian curvatures estimated on the triangulated sur-
face associated to the node m,
• colorR,G,B (m), a statistic of the texture/colour associ-
ated to the node.
Features are extracted at the finest level of resolution and as-
sociated to the corresponding nodes. The multiresolutional
aspect of the measures is ensured by the hierarchical rela-
tion between parents and children nodes. Our idea is to pro-
vide to the nodes all of the relevant characterisations that
could be calculated on a set of triangles. Our choices are
not exhaustive but reflect the current frequently used tech-
niques. Moreover, it is possible to favour one or several
measures by adaptating the weighting terms. This again, let
a lot of freedom to the users for their queries.
4.2. Volume calculation
Let’s consider the interval [µ1 , µ2 ] of the function µ as-
sociated to the node m. The relative volume v(m) is defined
as:
1 vol(m)
v(m) = · ,
R vol(S)
where vol(S) represents the total volume of the model, and
vol(m) stands for the volume of the section of m. vol(S) is
the sum of the tetrahedra formed by the oriented triangles of
the mesh and the centre of mass of the object [4]. vol(m) is
obtained by summing 1) the signed volume of the tetrahedra
formed by the triangles associated to m and the barycenter
of these triangles, 2) the signed volume of the tetrahedra
formed by this barycenter, an edge of the mesh correspond-
ing to the surface edge µ = µ1 associated to m, and the
barycenter of the points associated to these edges, and 3)
the symmetric volume for the surface edge µ = µ2 (cf. Fig-
ure 7). The factor R1 corresponds to the P R level of resolu-
tion of ARG(M ), leading to the relation m∈M v(m) = 1
as used for the relative area calculation a in [1]. Obviously,
this volume calculation method is valid only if triangles can
be oriented. Besides, an additive feature of the object sec-
3
tion associated to the node m could be the measure a(m)
v(m)2
which has no dimension.
Figure 7. Volume associated to a node obtained
by summing the volume of the three types of tetra-
hedra included in the section.
4.3. Cords measurement
The cords measure introduced in [5] is represented by a
normalised histogram of the distance from the triangles cen-
tres to the centre of mass of the object. Applied to a node n
at the finest level of resolution, the histogram cord(n) is the
histogram of the distances between the triangle centres as-
sociated to the node n, and the position of their barycenter.
Each contribution to the histogram is weighted by the trian-
gle area associated to the cord. Therefore, the histogram is
normalised by the factor R1 · area(S)1
where area(S) is the
total surface area of the object. The histogram cord(m) of
a parent node m at coarser resolution is thus the histogram
of the cords to the barycenter of the node m obtained using
the barycentres of the children of m. At the coarsest level
of resolution r = 0, the histogram cord(m) is equivalent
to the approach in [5] applied on the entire mesh. This sta-
tistical measure gives the information on the extent of a set
of triangles. Hence it is a signature of the mesh geometry
associated to a node. The use of statistical methods based
on histograms to describe an object, as the cords [5] or the
shape distribution [6], is well adapted for simple shapes.
In our context and from a certain level of resolution, nodes
are mainly locally associated to shapes such as cylinders or
paraboloids which justify the relevant use of these geomet-
rical measures.
4.4. Curvatures measurement
Local geometric properties of the surface are represented
by mean and Gaussian curvatures. We can see on Fig-
ure 8 that objects contains meaningful local informations
to characterise the geometrical variations. The mean curva-
ture is calculated on every points P of the mesh, according
to the usual formula, by summing the angles (θN )i of the
normals of the dihedral formed by the adjacent faces to P
(i = 1, ..., Ne where Ne is the number of edges adjacent
to P). Angles are weighted with the third of the mean area
(Sm )i of the two faces (barycentric area):
 
1 X (θN )i
curvm (P) = 1 ,
Ne i 3 (Sm )i
 Figure 9. Colour histograms of the set of triangles
associated to an ARG node.

cally for each node of the ARG at the coarsest level of res-
olution, and then hierarchically and globally for each level
of resolution:
Figure 8. Mean curvature calculated on each ver- X
tex of the mesh (model from [25]). color∗ (m) = color∗ (n),
n∈{children of m}

where ∗ represents R, G, or B and color∗ (n) is the colour

The Gaussian curvature at a point P is calculated using the
histogram of the node n normalised as in Sections 4.3 and
angular defect formula:
7.4.
P
2π − j θj
curvg (P) = 1 P , 4.6. Objects similarity
3 j Sj
Assuming two objects M and N , the function used to
Sj being the area of the j th triangle having P as one of its calculate their similarity is obtained by summing the simi-
vertices, and θj is the angle at vertex P in this triangle. The larity function of the matching pairs of nodes {m, n}:
two histograms of these curvatures are calculated for each X
node at the finest resolution and afterwards propagated to SIM (M, N ) = 1 − sim(m, n),
the parents: {m,n}
X
curv∗ (m) = curv∗ (n), where SIM is minimal for similar objects. The 2D/3D fea-
n∈{children of m} tures presented in the previous sub-sections have been intro-
duced in the function sim(m, n), with weight parameters
where ∗ represents m or g, and curv∗ (n) is the histogram (λ1 , λ2 , λ3 , λ4 ) in accordance with the desired queries:
of the curvatures of the triangle surface associated to n and
1
normalised by the factor R1 · area(S) . As for the cords his- • λ1 · min(v(m), v(n)),
togram, each contribution to curv∗ is weighted by the as- • λ2 · min(cord(m), cord(n)),
sociated triangle area. It is also possible to use only one
histogram to represent the local curvature by combining the • λ3 · min(curv∗ (m), curv∗ (n)),
two curvatures (cf. Koenderink shape index [19, 8]) or to
use any other characterisation of local curvatures [20, 21]. • λ4 · min(color∗ (m), color∗ (n)).

4.5. Texture extraction We define the min calculation between two histograms
hist(m) and hist(n) as:
When browsing in a database of 3D textured objects, it
N bin
can be also useful to make queries upon the texture or the X
colour of the models. The joint use of shape and texture min(hist(m), hist(n)) = min(histi (m), histi (n)),
i=1
is a highly discriminative criterion, but is still not much
exploited in 3D. For this purpose, we use the information where Nbin is the size of the histogram and histi is the ith
included in the texture maps associated to the 3D objects. value.
These 2D features will naturally be merged to the 3D fea- For all objects M , N and O, the function SIM has the
tures previously presented. Our colour quantification is following properties:
done using three normalised histograms on (R, G, B) (cf.
Figure 9). The quantification of the texture is obtained lo- 1. Self-identity: SIM (M, M ) = 0,
 2. Positivity: SIM (M, N ) ≥ 0,
3. Symmetry: SIM (M, N ) = SIM (N, M ),
As defined in [16], the function SIM is a semi-metric. The
triangle inequality is not verified as the function SIM takes
into account the pairs of matching nodes between two ob-
jects, and they can be different when comparing two dif-
ferent objects to a same one. A new function SIM satis-
fying the triangle inequality would probably perform better
classification and searching [17] but remains to be found.
Finally, we have obtained a flexible multiresolutional 3D
indexing scheme, both global and local, and using various
criteria illustrated by the different features extracted (topo-
logical, geometrical, and colorimetric).
5. Application to part matching
Our shape matching method has both the properties of
a high-level descriptor thanks to the global representation
with the multiresolutional Reeb graph, and a low-level de-
scriptor with the local 2D and 3D features extracted at each
level of resolution and for each node, especially at the finest
level. This multiresolutional aspect can be exploited for
many different purposes. Our current research work lead
us to a promising application which consist on using the en-
riched nodes for part matching as illustrated in Figure 10.
As a matter of fact, the information included in the graph
nodes are discriminant enough to be retrieved in a database.
Moreover, the different representations of the nodes at each
level of resolution, which include their children nodes, can
ensure the precision of the matching. An approach of part
Figure 10. Nodes taken from Reeb graphs for part
matching (models from [23]).
matching was presented in [14], but the skeletal represen-
tation of the objects was not well adapted for this purpose.
The lack of a multiresolutional strategy is obvious as a part
of a skeleton could be a too coarse description (a cylinder
could match anywhere). We then propose a part match-
ing scheme which relies on the ideas presented in this arti-
cle and which exploits the multiresolutional aspect and the
topological consistency criteria of the nodes for matching
shape parts, and for extracting 2D/3D features to retrieve
the most similar node.
Part matching scheme
Initialisation:
1. Choose an object M .
2. Choose a level of resolution.
3. Choose the node m at this level of resolution
which corresponds to the part to be matched with
other parts in the database.
Matching:
4. Compute the similarity function between m and
every nodes n at the same level of resolution (or
eventually at other close levels) among all the ob-
jects N in the database.
5. Test topological consistency on nodes similar
to m with respect to a predefined threshold for the
similarity function.
6. We consider now the subgraph of m and of all
its children as the ARG of the part of interest, that
is the ARG of the truncated object region associ-
ated to the node m. We consider similarly the sub-
graphs of all the consistent nodes n as the ARGs
of the parts corresponding to nodes n. Then we
apply the general matching algorithm described in
section 3 to these subgraphs in order to determine
the most similar parts to the one chosen in object
M as query.
6. Results
For each object, the ARG structure with the node at-
tributes are coded in a binary file. Its size is proportional
to the number of nodes and increases with the complexity
of the object. ARG files are computed once and require
∼10s for an object with 10000 triangles, the most time-
consuming being the computation of the function µ over
the object surface. For that we use the Dijkstra algorithm
with a complexity in O(N log(N )), N being the number
of vertices of the mesh. The ARG files stand for the fea-
ture vectors in the indexing framework, and the comparison
of two objects takes between 1 to 2 millisecond with a PC
P4-2GHz. The 3D model database was created by recon-
structing museum objects [18, 22], and downloading objects
from the Internet [23, 24, 26]. Most of the models have a
high resolution (10000 to 50000 triangles) and closed sur-
face with oriented triangles. To show the advantages of the
Augmented Reeb Graph, we have made our similarity tests
between eight different classes of objects (cf. Figure 11).
Several of these classes could be easily confused by com-
Figure 11. Eight classes of objects were used for
our tests. There are different numbers of objects
per class for a total of 50 objects (models from [22,
23, 24, 26]).
mon approaches: statues, human models, elongated vases,
etc. Some statues are representations of human beings but
don’t look like the models of the human class, some others
are very unique in the database and should not match with
other objects. For our classification test (cf. Figure 12), we
used the values αl = 0.3, βl = 0.15, γl = 0.15, δl = 0.2
and l = 0.2 with L1 norms for the loss function, and
αs = 0.65 and βs = 0.35 for the sim function. A test
using the original approach of [1] was performed to illus-
trate the effectiveness of our approach (cf. Figure 13). We
Figure 12. Results of the similarity function on 50
models using the ARG matching method: similar
models are retrieved and classes are well sepa-
rated.
Figure 13. Results of the similarity function us-
ing the original approach in [1]: more unwanted
similarity are found between objects of different
classes.
use the weight αl = αs = 0.5 and βl = βs = 0.5. As said
previously, the lack of geometrical information compared
to our extension leads to less nodes matching and then sim-
ilar objects could be missed when the topology matching is
wrong.
These preliminary results reveal that the ARG method is
more efficient to retrieve object classes. The six other tested
methods make a strong confusion between statues and other
objects (cf. Figure 14). Those with the best results (com-
bined histograms of cord lengths and cord angles with the
1st principal axis [5] and 3D Hough Descriptor [8]) are
more noisy than the ARG and still present some class mix-
ing and wrong matching. Moreover, the results concerning
the classification of the vases show that they are not efficient
enough to distinguish the difference between vases with one
or two handles, whereas the ARG is. The D2 shape distri-
bution [6], the complex EGI [10], the 3D shape spectrum
descriptor [8] and the surface/volume ratio [4] were not ef-
ficient on our database. The Figure 15 illustrates the Reeb
graph for objects of different classes and obviously its ha-
bility to catch the genus of the object and then its specific
power for graph matching.
Figure 14. Results of the six other tested meth-
ods: there are lots of noise and classes are mixed.
Figure 15. Reeb graphs of different objects at
level of resolution 4: the graphs keep the genus
(models from [22, 23]).
7. Conclusion
Keeping in sight our problematic of textured 3D object
indexing and content-based retrieval, our study leads us to
enhance the approach presented in [1] by introducing the
Augmented Reeb Graph.
Geometrical and colorimetric attributes are added to the
topological consistency criteria which are also extended.
The loss function calculation is consequently modified, and
the similarity function is improved by merging the different
2D/3D features (geometrical and visual).
Then, we obtain a multiresolutional and multicriteria shape
descriptor. Our results demonstrate the ability of the
ARG to retrieve similar objects classes in a database, and
particularly objects with long appendices, or with the same
genus. However this method seems not so well adapted
for compact objects as busts or faces. And actually the
function µ works with meshes that have only one connected
component, thus the objects should have been correctly
modelized.
Further works could be done to improve the characterisa-
tion of the texture. For example by unfolding the texture
associated to each node (patch), and reparametrizing it
to extract spatial or frequency informations. Our method
aims the interactivity and the flexibility, but requires lots
of parameters (weight terms of the different features). It
could be then interesting to apply optimisation techniques
on parameters to define default values in case of specific
applications for which learning sets could be provided.
Perspectives of research also concern the choice of the
function µ and the construction of the Reeb graph. It
seems that associating methods using a robust graph (which
allows topological perturbation) such as the Extended Reeb
Graph [15] with our approach of Augmented Reeb Graph
(with its multiresolutional aspect), could be very efficient.
The similarity function can be a useful tool to compare
objects with similar shapes, especially when associated to
2D and 3D features. For example, they could establish
measurements between two objects depending on their vol-
ume, curvatures or visual differences. Moreover, it is also
possible to use these informations to make classifications
with respect to any of the criteria offer by the extracted
features (colour,size,...). In fact, as the technology of the
computer keeps on growing (CPU, memory and HD size),
Augmented Reeb Graph will allow us to integrate and
merge all of the future most relevant shape descriptors.
Also, other applications such as part matching seems
accessible with our approach but has not been developed
yet and remains to be fully tested. Finally, we would like
to point out again the flexible and robust aspects of our
approach, its effectiveness and accuracy relying on the
fusion of different techniques.
Acknowledgements
This work has been partially supported by the SCULP-
TEUR European project IST-2001-35372 [22]. The authors
would like to thank Pierre-Alexandre Pont for having coded
the algorithm of [1] and for the additional topological con-
sistency criterion, and Bianca Falcidieno and Marco Attene
for their precious advice concerning the function µ.
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