3D object retrieval is an important research issue in the area of computer graphics for applications such as computer-aided design, simulation, and visualisation. The performance of 3D object retrieval systems is dependent on the development of efficient and effective descriptors and similarity measures. Presented is an effective approach for supporting 3D object retrieval based on optimising the gradient descriptor which has recently been shown to perform among the state of the art. The approach relies on sparse coding and the effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by experimental evaluation.Introduction: 3D object data is becoming ubiquitous in many application areas. It is basic to computer-aided design, in which machining parts, buildings, and other types of objects are composed of 3D object parts, forming blueprints for real-world construction. 3D objects are also indispensable elements in scientific simulation, visualisation, serious and entertainment gaming. To reuse existing 3D object content from large 3D object repositories, methods are needed for efficient retrieval of 3D objects as requested by users. Approaches for 3D object retrieval consider methods for implementing similarity functions that allow retrieval and clustering in large 3D object databases. To date, many retrieval methods have been proposed to compute the similarity between 3D objects for usage in retrieval algorithms. One of the most popular approaches is to extract descriptors for each 3D object and determine the similarity between each pair of objects based on the distance between them, calculated with a metric defined on the descriptors.In this Letter, we present an improved approach for supporting viewbased 3D object retrieval by applying feature optimisation in a higher dimension. We apply the approach on an encompassing benchmark data set representing various 3D objects that include pose, partial occlusion, and shape. We experimentally show that the proposed method outperforms an existing state-of-the-art method in terms of retrieval quality, and thus we recommend it for 3D object retrieval.