Abstract: With the proliferation of 3D models on the Internet,it becomes an emergency task to obtain the desired models from the existing.This paper proposed a kind of boundary descriptor according to the characteristics of the contour images of projected 3D models. This descriptor is applied in 3D model retrieval by combining with normalization and orthogonal projection. Using ten categories of 3D models in PSB, and Comparing with the performance of ray-based method and D2 shape distribution method and Zernike moment method,the experiment results show that the method is stable,and improves the accuracy of retrieval in artificiality category and plant category.