NeRD: Neural 3D Reflection Symmetry Detector

Recent advances have shown that symmetry, a structural prior that most objects exhibit, can support a variety of single-view 3D understanding tasks. However, detecting 3D symmetry from an image remains a challenging task. Previous works either assume the symmetry is given or detect the symmetry with a heuristic-based method. In this paper, we present NeRD, a Neural 3D Reflection Symmetry Detector, which combines the strength of learning-based recognition and geometry-based reconstruction to accurately recover the normal direction of objects’ mirror planes. Specifically, we enumerate the symmetry planes with a coarse-to-fine strategy and find the best ones by building 3D cost volumes to examine the intra-image pixel correspondence from the symmetry. Our experiments show that the symmetry planes detected with our method are significantly more accurate than the planes from direct CNN regression on both synthetic and real datasets. More importantly, we also demonstrate that the detected symmetry can be used to improve the performance of downstream tasks such as pose estimation and depth map regression by a wide margin over existing methods. The code of this paper has been made public at https://github.com/zhou13/nerd.