An Acceleration Method for Symmetry Detection using Edge Segmentation

Symmetry is easily found in animals and plants as well as in artificial structures. It is useful not only for human cognitive process but also for image understanding by computer. Application areas include face detection and recognition, indexing of image database, image segmentation and detection, and analysis of medical images. The method used in this paper extracts edges, and the perpendicular bisector of any pair of selected edge points is considered to be a candidate axis of symmetry. The coefficients of the perpendicular bisectors are accumulated in the coefficient space. Axis of symmetry is determined to be the line for which the histogram has maximum value. This method shows good results, but the usefulness of the method is restricted because the amount of computation increases proportional to the square of the number of edges. In this paper, an acceleration method is proposed which performs $2^{2n}$ times faster than the original one. Experiment on 20 test images shows that the proposed method using level-3 image segmentation performs 63.9 times faster than the original method.