Symmetry operators in computer vision

Symmetry plays a remarkable role in perception problems. For example, peaks of brain activity are measured in correspondence with visual patterns showing symmetry. Relevance of symmetry in vision was already noted by Köler in 1929. Here, properties of a symmetry operator are reported and a new algorithm to measure local symmetries is proposed. Its performance is tested on segmentation of complex visual patterns and the classification of sparse images. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.