Attention Based Symmetry Detection in Colour Images

Symmetry is a fundamental structure that is found to some extent in all images. It is thought to be an important factor in the human visual system for obtaining understanding and extracting semantics from visual material. This paper describes a method of detecting axes of reflective symmetry in images that does not require prior assumptions about the image being analysed. The approach is derived from earlier work on visual attention that identifies salient regions and translational symmetries. Some results are reported on natural colour images taken from the Corel database.