  In this paper, we propose 3D point-capsule networks, an auto-encoder designed
to process sparse 3D point clouds while preserving spatial arrangements of the
input data. 3D capsule networks arise as a direct consequence of our novel
unified 3D auto-encoder formulation. Their dynamic routing scheme and the
peculiar 2D latent space deployed by our approach bring in improvements for
several common point cloud-related tasks, such as object classification, object
reconstruction and part segmentation as substantiated by our extensive
evaluations. Moreover, it enables new applications such as part interpolation
and replacement.
