Using Bilateral Symmetry to Improve 3D Reconstruction from Image Sequences

In previous applications, bilateral symmetry of objects was used either as a descriptive feature in domains such as recognition and grasping or as a way to reduce the complexity of structure from motion. In this paper we demonstrate how bilateral symmetry can be used to improve the accuracy in 3D reconstruction. The symmetry property is used to "symmetrize" data before and after reconstruction. We first show how to compute the closest symmetric 2D and 3D configurations given noisy data. This gives us a symmetrization procedure, which we apply to images before reconstruction, and which we apply to the 3D configuration after reconstruction. We demonstrate a significant improvement obtained with real images. We demonstrate the relative merits of symmetrization before and after reconstruction using simulated and real data.