Partial intrinsic reflectional symmetry of 3D shapes

Abstract

While many 3D objects exhibit various forms of global symmetries, prominent intrinsic symmetries which exist only on parts of an object are also well recognized. Such partial symmetries are often seen as more natural than a global one, even when the symmetric parts are under complex pose. We introduce an algorithm to extract partial intrinsic reflectional symmetries (PIRS) of a 3D shape. Given a closed 2-manifold mesh, we develop a voting scheme to obtain an intrinsic reflectional symmetry axis (IRSA) transform, which is a scalar field over the mesh that accentuates prominent IRSAs of the shape. We then extract a set of explicit IRSA curves on the shape based on a refined measure of local reflectional symmetry support along a curve. The iterative refinement procedure combines IRSA-induced region growing and region-constrained symmetry support refinement to improve accuracy and address potential issues arising from rotational symmetries in the shape. We show how the extracted IRSA curves can be incorporated into a conventional mesh segmentation scheme so that the implied symmetry cues can be utilized to obtain more meaningful results. We also demonstrate the use of IRSA curves for symmetry-driven part repair.