PRS-Net: Planar Reflective Symmetry Detection Net for 3D Models

In geometry processing, symmetry is the universally high-level structural information of the 3d models and benefits many geometry processing tasks including shape segmentation, alignment, matching, completion, e.g.. Thus it is an important problem to analyze various forms of the symmetry of 3D shapes. The planar reflective symmetry is the most fundamental one. Traditional methods based on spatial sampling can be time consuming and may not be able to identify all the symmetry planes. In this paper, we present a novel learning framework to automatically discover global planar reflective symmetry of a 3D shape. Our framework trains an unsupervised 3D convolutional neural network to extract global model features and then outputs possible global symmetry parameters, where input shapes are represented using voxels. We introduce a dedicated symmetry distance loss along with a regularization loss to avoid generating duplicated symmetry planes. Our network can also identify isotropic shapes by predicting their rotation axes. We further provide a method to remove invalid and duplicated planes and axes. We demonstrate that our method is able to produce reliable and accurate results. Our neural network-based method is hundreds of times faster than the state-of-the-art method, which is based on sampling. Our method is also robust even with noisy or incomplete input surfaces.