While existing methods for 3D surface approximation use local geometric properties, we propose that more perceptually intuitive results can be obtained by considering global shape properties such as symmetry. We modify the Variational Shape Approximation technique to consider the symmetries, near-symmetries, and partial symmetries of the input mesh. This has the effect of making the output model symmetric, if doing so does not increase the error substantially. We demonstrate that using symmetry produces results that more closely correspond to human expectations, especially when simplifying to very few polygons.

@inproceedings{Podolak:2007:SRO,
   author = "Joshua Podolak and Aleksey Golovinskiy and Szymon Rusinkiewicz",
   title = "Symmetry-Enhanced Remeshing of Surfaces",
   booktitle = "Symposium on Geometry Processing",
   year = "2007",
   month = jul
}