In this paper, we establish a baseline for object symmetry detection in complex backgrounds by presenting a new benchmark and an end-to-end deep learning approach, opening up a promising direction for symmetry detection in the wild. The new benchmark, named Sym-PASCAL, spans challenges including object diversity, multi-objects, part-invisibility, and various complex backgrounds that are far beyond those in existing datasets. The proposed symmetry detection approach, named Side-output Residual Network (SRN), leverages output Residual Units (RUs) to fit the errors between the object symmetry groundtruth and the outputs of RUs. By stacking RUs in a deep-to-shallow manner, SRN exploits the 'flow' of errors among multiple scales to ease the problems of fitting complex outputs with limited layers, suppressing the complex backgrounds, and effectively matching object symmetry of different scales. Experimental results validate both the benchmark and its challenging aspects related to realworld images, and the state-of-the-art performance of our symmetry detection approach. The benchmark and the code for SRN are publicly available at this https URL.
Researchers have tried to extract symmetry in color images based on multi-scale super-pixels. One hypothesis is that the object symmetry axes are the subsets of lines connecting the center points of super-pixels @cite_8 . Such line subsets are explored from the super-pixels using a sequence of deformable disc models extracting the symmetry pathes @cite_12 . Their consistence and smoothness are enforced with spatial filters, e.g., a particle filter, which link local skeleton segments into continuous curves @cite_0 . Due to the lack of object prior and the learning module, however, these methods are still limited to handle the images with simple backgrounds.
@cite_0 @cite_12 @cite_8
2114379931 1988809745 2276958818 174734558
Symmetry is a powerful shape regularity that's been exploited by perceptual grouping researchers in both human and computer vision to recover part structure from an image without a priori knowledge of scene content. Drawing on the concept of a medial axis, defined as the locus of centers of maximal inscribed discs that sweep out a symmetric part, we model part recovery as the search for a sequence of deformable maximal inscribed disc hypotheses generated from a multiscale super pixel segmentation, a framework proposed by LEV09. However, we learn affinities between adjacent super pixels in a space that's invariant to bending and tapering along the symmetry axis, enabling us to capture a wider class of symmetric parts. Moreover, we introduce a global cost that perceptually integrates the hypothesis space by combining a pair wise and a higher-level smoothing term, which we minimize globally using dynamic programming. The new framework is demonstrated on two datasets, and is shown to significantly outperform the baseline LEV09. This paper shows that the introduction of non-uniform blur is very useful for comparing images, and proposes a neural network model that extracts axes of symmetry from visual patterns. The blurring operation greatly increases robustness against deformations and various kinds of noise, and largely reduces computational cost. Asymmetry between two groups of signals can be detected in a single action by the use of non-uniform blur having a cone-shaped distribution.The proposed model is a hierarchical multi-layered network, which consists of a contrast-extracting layer, edge-extracting layers (simple and complex types), and layers extracting symmetry axes. The model extracts oriented edges from an input image first, and then tries to extract axes of symmetry. The model checks conditions of symmetry, not directly from the oriented edges, but from a blurred version of the response of edge-extracting layer. The input patterns can be complicated line drawings, plane figures or gray-scaled natural images taken by CCD cameras. An unsupervised procedure to local symmetry detection in natural images is proposed.Achieved via a Hough-style voting approach made at different scales and coordinate spaces.A final denoising scheme aims at removing noise and spurious local symmetries.Experiments have been conducted on the recent extension of the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset.The proposed method performs well compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms. Display Omitted In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised and simple approach to local symmetry detection of ribbon-like structure in natural images. The proposed model consists in quantifying the presence of a partial medial axis segment, existing between each pair of (preliminary detected) line segments delineating the boundary of two textured regions, by a set of heuristics related both to the geometrical structure of each pair of line segments and its ability to locally delimit a homogeneous texture region in the image. This semi-local approach is finally embedded in a two-step algorithm with an amplification step, via a Hough-style voting approach achieved at different scales and coordinate spaces which aims at determining the dominant local symmetries present in the image and a final denoising step, via an averaging procedure, which aims at removing noise and spurious local symmetries. The experiments, reported in this paper and conducted on the recent extension of the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset for the local symmetry detection task, demonstrate that the proposed symmetry detector performs well compared to the best existing state-of-the-art algorithms recently proposed in the literature. In this work we propose a learning-based approach to symmetry detection in natural images. We focus on ribbon-like structures, i.e. contours marking local and approximate reflection symmetry and make three contributions to improve their detection. First, we create and make publicly available a ground-truth dataset for this task by building on the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset. Second, we extract features representing multiple complementary cues, such as grayscale structure, color, texture, and spectral clustering information. Third, we use supervised learning to learn how to combine these cues, and employ MIL to accommodate the unknown scale and orientation of the symmetric structures. We systematically evaluate the performance contribution of each individual component in our pipeline, and demonstrate that overall we consistently improve upon results obtained using existing alternatives.