Symmetrical motif extraction for periodic ornamental patterns

This paper presents an automatic method to extract symmetrical motif for periodic ornamental patterns. It is well known that for every periodic pattern a lattice of points is associated. The points of this lattice are inter-related by two translational vectors, which define the translational unit representing the repetitive motif. This repetitive motif must be Symmetric if we are interested to identify the symmetry group to which a particular pattern belongs. To do so, we propose a new method based on autocorrelation function ACF and SIFT algorithm. Tests on 166 images characterized with different visual quality demonstrate the capability of the proposed method for automatic periodic motif extraction without the need of human intervention.