In the last decades, 3D models have known a significant expansion, as we can see them in many fields such as computer vision, biology, augmented reality, engineering, and even medicine. They become more and more popular and accessible than ever. Due to these facts, there is an increasing need for a retrieval system, which can return the most similar 3D objects existing in the database to the query. In the present paper, a new retrieval approach is proposed, based on a multi-criteria method to

more »

... nerate a compact descriptor, which represents a signature for each 3D model. The key idea behind this approach is to try to extract the best out of each criterion (i.e., measure) by extracting a combined score using the Data envelopment analysis method (DEA). The results of the proposed method are very satisfactory and outperform some commonly used retrieval methods which highlight the potential and the performance of our approach.