When working with three-dimensional data, choice of representation is key. We
explore voxel-based models, and present evidence for the viability of
voxellated representations in applications including shape modeling and object
classification. Our key contributions are methods for training voxel-based
variational autoencoders, a user interface for exploring the latent space
learned by the autoencoder, and a deep convolutional neural network
architecture for object classification. We address challenges unique to
voxel-based representations, and empirically evaluate our models on the
ModelNet benchmark, where we demonstrate a 51.5% relative improvement in the
state of the art for object classification.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 2 table
