In the recent decade, the development of 3D scanners brings the expansion of 3D models, which yields in the increase of demand for developing effective 3D point cloud retrieval methods using only unorganized point clouds instead of mesh data. In this paper, we propose a meshing-free framework for point cloud retrieval by exploiting a bidirectional similarity measurement on local features. Specifically, we first introduce an effective pipeline for keypoint selection by applying principal component analysis to pose normalization and thresholding local similarity of normals. Then, a point cloud based feature descriptor is employed to compute local feature descriptors directly from point clouds. Finally, we propose a bidirectional feature match strategy to handle the similarity measure. Experimental evaluation on a publicly available benchmark demonstrates the effectiveness of our framework and shows it can outperform other alternatives involving state-of-the-art techniques. INDEX TERMS Point cloud retrieval, 3D shape retrieval, bidirectional feature match.