Abstract: 3D object retrieval based on range image queries that represent partial views of real 3D objects is presented. The complete 3D models of the database are described by a set of panoramic views, and a Bag-of-Visual-Words model is built using SIFT features extracted from them. To address the problem of partial matching, we suggest a histogram computation scheme, on the panoramic views, that represents local information by taking into account spatial context. Furthermore, a number of optimization techniques are applied throughout the process for enhancing the retrieval performance. Its superior performance is shown by evaluating it against state-of-the-art methods on standard datasets.