In this paper

we proposed an improved 3D object representation first

which computes the local signatures of a given basic polygon on the surface mesh

and converts the signatures to a 2D array called the distance-angle(DA) images.This representation is adaptive to free-form objects

resistant to occlusion and clutter.Furthermore

it has distinct meaning

and adaptation to different resolution and irregular triangle mesh.Secondly

based on the representation

a novel 3D object recognition algorithm is presented

which is a multi-resolution mesh based

coarse-to-fine recognition.By matching the DA image of a polygon in the scene surface mesh with the DA images of models in low resolution

a model candidate set is obtained.The set is filtered in the neighborhood of the matched polygons in high-resolution mesh and verified by the model candidate sets of other polygons.Experiments show that this algorithm needs less computation

and is very accurate and robust.