A monocular approach to 3-D reconstruction based on bilateral symmetry

An object with a plane of symmetry is called bilaterally symmetrical. When an arbitrary object and its image in a plane mirror are bith visible in a monocular view, the object and its image in the mirror are also bilaterally symmetrical with respect to the mirror. In this paper, we present a method for 3-D reconstruction from a monocular image obtained by a calibrated camera based on the bilateral symmetry theory. We first verify the algorithm using a calibration block that is bilaterally symmetrical. Then we test the algorithm using more natural object and a plane mirror whose position and orientation are known. Very good reconstruction results have been obtained in the experiments.