A large synthetic 3D human body model dataset using real-world body size distributions is created. The model dataset may follow real-world body parameter distributions. Depth sensors can be integrated into mobile devices such as tablets, cellphones, and wearable devices. Body measurements for a user are extracted from a single frontal-view depth map using joint location information. Estimates of body measurements are combined with local geometry features around joint locations to form a robust multi-dimensional feature vector. A fast nearest-neighbor search is performed using the feature vector for the user and the feature vectors for the synthetic models to identify the closest match. The retrieved model can be used in various applications such as clothes shopping, virtual reality, online gaming, and others.