Learning-based symmetry detection in natural images

Abstract. In this work we propose a learning-based approach to sym-metry detection in natural images. We focus on ribbon-like structures, i.e. contours marking local and approximate re ection symmetry and make three contributions to improve their detection. First, we create and make publicly available a ground-truth dataset for this task by build-ing 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 super-vised learning to learn how to combine these cues, and employ MIL to accommodate the unknown scale and orientation of the symmetric struc-tures. 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.