Abstract: A content-based algorithm for retrieval of the 3D model composed of triangular meshes is proposed.First we propose a new shape descriptor of the 3D model by remeshing the triangles with increased dimensions.We then determine the polar axis of the 3D model and adopt it to define the shape with spherical harmonic basis functions(SHBF).It is shown that the coefficients of the SHBF for a particular shape is rotation invariant around the polar axis and can be represented as the shape descriptor.The Euclidean distances of shape descriptors are finally evaluated to compare the similarity between 3D models.Experiments demonstrate that our algorithm provides high accuracy and efficiency for content-based 3D model retrieval.