The extended abstract describes a method for recognizing similar sub-parts of objects described by 3D polygonal meshes. The innovation of this method is the coupling of structure and geometry in the matching process. First of all, the structure of the shape is coded in a graph where each node is associated to a sub-part of the shape. Then, the matching between two shapes is approached using a graph-matching technique relying upon a geometric description of each sub-part. @InProceedings{marini_et_al:DSP:2006:651, author = {Simone Marini and Biasotti Silvia and Falcidieno Bianca}, title = {Partial Matching by Structural Descriptors}, booktitle = {Content-Based Retrieval}, year = {2006}, editor = {Tim Crawford and Remco C. Veltkamp }, number = {06171}, series = {Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings}, ISSN = {1862-4405}, publisher = {Internationales Begegnungs- und Forschungszentrum f{"u}r Informatik (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2006/651}, annote = {Keywords: Partial Matching, 3D Structural Shape Descriptor, Graph Matching} }