A method and a device for 3D shape matching based on a local reference frame are proposed. After acquiring a 3D point cloud and feature points in the method, the feature point set is projected to a plane, and feature transformation is performed on the projected points by using at least one factor from the distances between the 3D points and the feature points, the distances between the 3D points and the projected points, and the average distances between the 3D points and its 1-ring neighboring points to acquire a point distribution with a larger variance in a certain direction than the projected point set, and the local reference frame is determined based on the transformed point distribution. The 3D local feature descriptor established based on this local reference frame can encode the 3D local surface information more robustly, so as to obtain a better 3D shape matching effect.