Feature-Preserving 3D Thumbnail Creation with Voxel-Based Two-Phase Decomposition

We present a feature-preserving 3D thumbnail system for efficient 3D models database browsing. The 3D thumbnail is simplified from the original model so it requires much less hardware resource and transferring time. With topology-preserved 3D thumbnails, the user can browse multiple 3D models at once, and view each model from different angles interactively. To well preserve the topology of the original model, we propose an innovative voxel-based shape decomposition approach, which identifies meaningful parts of a 3D object, the 3D thumbnail is then created by approximating each individual part with fitting primitives. Experimental results demonstrates that the proposed approach can decompose a 3D model well to create a feature-preserving 3D thumbnail.