DeepPano: Deep Panoramic Representation for 3-D Shape Recognition

This letter introduces a robust representation of 3-D shapes, named DeepPano, learned with deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). Firstly, each 3-D shape is converted into a panoramic view, namely a cylinder projection around its principle axis. Then, a variant of CNN is specifically designed for learning the deep representations directly from such views. Different from typical CNN, a row-wise max-pooling layer is inserted between the convolution and fully-connected layers, making the learned representations invariant to the rotation around a principle axis. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art retrieval/classification results on two large-scale 3-D model datasets (ModelNet-10 and ModelNet-40), outperforming typical methods by a large margin.