English

ArchSym: Detecting 3D-Grounded Architectural Symmetries in the Wild

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-04-27 v1

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.22202,
  title  = {ArchSym: Detecting 3D-Grounded Architectural Symmetries in the Wild},
  author = {Hanyu Chen and Ruojin Cai and Steve Marschner and Noah Snavely},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.22202},
  year   = {2026}
}

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project page: https://hanyuc.com/archsym/