Skeleton-based intrinsic symmetry detection on point clouds

We present a skeleton-based algorithm for intrinsic symmetry detection on imperfect 3D point cloud data. The data imperfections such as noise and incompleteness make it difficult to reliably compute geodesic distances, which play essential roles in existing intrinsic symmetry detection algorithms. In this paper, we leverage recent advances in curve skeleton extraction from point clouds for symmetry detection. Our method exploits the properties of curve skeletons, such as homotopy to the input shape, approximate isometry-invariance, and skeleton-to-surface mapping, for the detection task. Starting from a curve skeleton extracted from an input point cloud, we first compute symmetry electors, each of which is composed of a set of skeleton node pairs pruned with a cascade of symmetry filters. The electors are used to vote for symmetric node pairs indicating the symmetry map on the skeleton. A symmetry correspondence matrix (SCM) is constructed for the input point cloud through transferring the symmetry map from skeleton to point cloud. The final symmetry regions on the point cloud are detected via spectral analysis over the SCM. Experiments on raw point clouds, captured by a 3D scanner or the Microsoft Kinect, demonstrate the robustness of our algorithm. We also apply our method to repair incomplete scans based on the detected intrinsic symmetries. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.