3DNet: Large-scale object class recognition from CAD models

3D object and object class recognition gained momentum with the arrival of low-cost RGB-D sensors and enables robotics tasks not feasible years ago. Scaling object class recognition to hundreds of classes still requires extensive time and many objects for learning. To overcome the training issue, we introduce a methodology for learning 3D descriptors from synthetic CAD-models and classification of never-before-seen objects at the first glance, where classification rates and speed are suited for robotics tasks. We provide this in 3DNet (3d-net.org), a free resource for object class recognition and 6DOF pose estimation from point cloud data. 3DNet provides a large-scale hierarchical CAD-model databases with increasing numbers of classes and difficulty with 10, 50, 100 and 200 object classes together with evaluation datasets that contain thousands of scenes captured with a RGB-D sensor. 3DNet further provides an open-source framework based on the Point Cloud Library (PCL) for testing new descriptors and benchmarking of state-of-the-art descriptors together with pose estimation procedures to enable robotics tasks such as search and grasping.