Analyzing skewed symmetries

Abstract

Symmetry is pervasive in both man-made objects and nature. Since symmetries project to skew symmetries, finding axes of skew symmetry is an important vision task. This paper presents a linear time algorithm for finding the axes of skew symmetry, where the degree of symmetry is known. First, we present a review and critique of current methods for finding the axes of skew symmetry. Next, we decompose the problem of finding skew symmetry into the subproblems of solving for the rotational parameter of a “shear symmetry” and recovering the shear parameter of a reflexive symmetry. Using this approach, the authors derive a direct, non-heuristic moment-based technique for finding the axes of skew symmetry. For skew symmetric figures with degree of symmetry less than five we obtain a closed-form solution. The method does not rely on continuous contours but assumes there is no occlusion and requires knowing the contour's degree of symmetry. It is the first algorithm to find the axes of skew symmetry inO(n) time, where n is the number of contour points. The method is especially suited to industrial applications where the degree of symmetry is often knowna priori. Examples of the method are presented for both real and synthetic images, and an error analysis of the method is given.