A growing number of 3D graphic applications have an impact on today’s society. These applications are being used in several domains ranging from digital entertainment, computer aided design, to medical applications. In this context, a 3D object search engine with a good performance in time consuming and results becomes mandatory. We propose a novel approach for 3D-model retrieval based on closed curves. Then we enhance our method to handle partial 3D-model retrieval. Our method starts by the definition of an invariant mapping function. The important properties of a mapping function are its invariance to rigid and non rigid transformations, the correct description of the 3D-model, its insensitivity to noise, its robustness to topology changes, and its independance on parameters. However, current state-of-the-art methods do not respect all these properties. To respect these properties, we define our mapping function based on the diffusion and the commute-time distances. To prove the properties of this function, we compute the Reeb graph of the 3D-models. To describe the whole 3D-model, using our mapping function, we generate indexed closed curves from a source point detected automatically at the center of a 3D-model. Each curve describes a small region of the 3D-model. These curves lead to create an invariant descriptor to different transformations. To show the robustness of our method on various classes of 3D-models with different poses, we use shapes from SHREC 2012. We also compare our approach to existing methods in the state-of-the-art with a dataset from SHREC 2010. For partial 3D-model retrieval, we enhance the proposed method using the Bag-Of-Features built with all the extracted closed curves, and show the accurate performances using the same dataset
