ArchSym: Detecting 3D-Grounded Architectural Symmetries in the Wild
This work addresses the lack of learning-based methods for 3D symmetry detection in real-world scenes, providing a dataset and detector for architectural symmetries.
The paper presents the first framework for detecting 3D-grounded reflectional symmetries from single in-the-wild RGB images, focusing on architectural landmarks. It introduces a scalable data annotation pipeline and a symmetry detector that significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on a new benchmark.
Symmetry detection is a fundamental problem in computer vision, and symmetries serve as powerful priors for downstream tasks. However, existing learning-based methods for detecting 3D symmetries from single images have been almost exclusively trained and evaluated on object-centric or synthetic datasets, and thus fail to generalize to real-world scenes. Furthermore, due to the inherent scale ambiguity of monocular inputs, which makes localizing the 3D plane an ill-posed problem, many existing works only predict the plane's orientation. In this paper, we address these limitations by presenting the first framework for detecting 3D-grounded reflectional symmetries from single, in-the-wild RGB images, focusing on architectural landmarks. We introduce two key innovations: (1) a scalable data annotation pipeline to automatically curate a large-scale dataset of architectural symmetries, ArchSym, from SfM reconstructions by leveraging cross-view image matching; and building on the dataset, (2) a single-view symmetry detector that accurately localizes symmetries in 3D by parameterizing them as signed distance maps defined relative to predicted scene geometry. We validate our symmetry annotation pipeline against geometry-based alternatives and demonstrate that our symmetry detector significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on our new benchmark.