Abstract: With recent improvements in methods for the acquisition and rendering of 3D models, the need for retrieval of models has gained prominence in the graphics and vision communities. A variety of methods have been proposed that enable the ef cient querying of model repositories for a desired 3D shape. Many of these methods use a 3D model as a query and attempt to retrieve models from the database that have a similar shape.

In this paper we consider the implications of anisotropy on the shape matching paradigm. In particular, we propose a novel method for matching 3D models that factors the shape matching equation as the disjoint outer product of anisotropy and geometric comparisons. We provide a general method for computing the factored similarity metric and show how this approach can be applied to improve the matching performance of many existing shape matching methods.