Figure 1: The Planar Reflective Symmetry Transform captures the degree of symmetry of arbitrary shapes with respect to reflection through all planes in space. Although symmetry measures are computed for planes (lines in 2D), for this visualization, points are colored by the symmetry measure of the plane with the largest symmetry passing through them, with darker lines representing greater symmetries. AbstractSymmetry is an important cue for many applications, including object alignment, recognition, and segmentation. In this paper, we describe a planar reflective symmetry transform (PRST) that captures a continuous measure of the reflectional symmetry of a shape with respect to all possible planes. This transform combines and extends previous work that has focused on global symmetries with respect to the center of mass in 3D meshes and local symmetries with respect to points in 2D images. We provide an efficient Monte Carlo sampling algorithm for computing the transform for surfaces and show that it is stable under common transformations. We also provide an iterative refinement algorithm to find local maxima of the transform precisely. We use the transform to define two new geometric properties, center of symmetry and principal symmetry axes, and show that they are useful for aligning objects in a canonical coordinate system. Finally, we demonstrate that the symmetry transform is useful for several applications in computer graphics, including shape matching, segmentation of meshes into parts, and automatic viewpoint selection.

Figure 1: The Planar Reflective Symmetry Transform captures the degree of symmetry of arbitrary shapes with respect to reflection through all planes in space. Although symmetry measures are computed for planes (lines in 2D), for this visualization, points are colored by the symmetry measure of the plane with the largest symmetry passing through them, with darker lines representing greater symmetries. AbstractSymmetry is an important cue for many applications, including object alignment, recognition, and segmentation. In this paper, we describe a planar reflective symmetry transform (PRST) that captures a continuous measure of the reflectional symmetry of a shape with respect to all possible planes. This transform combines and extends previous work that has focused on global symmetries with respect to the center of mass in 3D meshes and local symmetries with respect to points in 2D images. We provide an efficient Monte Carlo sampling algorithm for computing the transform for surfaces and show that it is stable under common transformations. We also provide an iterative refinement algorithm to find local maxima of the transform precisely. We use the transform to define two new geometric properties, center of symmetry and principal symmetry axes, and show that they are useful for aligning objects in a canonical coordinate system. Finally, we demonstrate that the symmetry transform is useful for several applications in computer graphics, including shape matching, segmentation of meshes into parts, and automatic viewpoint selection.

Abstract. Perfect, partial, and approximate symmetries are pervasive in 3D surface meshes of real-world objects. However, current digital geometry processing algorithms generally ignore them, instead focusing on local shape features and differential surface properties. This paper investigates how detection of large-scale symmetries can be used to guide processing of 3D meshes. It investigates a framework for mesh processing that includes steps for symmetrization (applying a warp to make a surface more symmetric) and symmetric remeshing (approximating a surface with a mesh having symmetric topology). These steps can be used to enhance the symmetries of a mesh, to decompose a mesh into its symmetric parts and asymmetric residuals, and to establish correspondences between symmetric mesh features. Applications are demonstrated for modeling, beautification, and simplification of nearly symmetric surfaces.

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