  We propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based model "RotationNet,"
which takes multi-view images of an object as input and jointly estimates its
pose and object category. Unlike previous approaches that use known viewpoint
labels for training, our method treats the viewpoint labels as latent
variables, which are learned in an unsupervised manner during the training
using an unaligned object dataset. RotationNet is designed to use only a
partial set of multi-view images for inference, and this property makes it
useful in practical scenarios where only partial views are available. Moreover,
our pose alignment strategy enables one to obtain view-specific feature
representations shared across classes, which is important to maintain high
accuracy in both object categorization and pose estimation. Effectiveness of
RotationNet is demonstrated by its superior performance to the state-of-the-art
methods of 3D object classification on 10- and 40-class ModelNet datasets. We
also show that RotationNet, even trained without known poses, achieves the
state-of-the-art performance on an object pose estimation dataset. The code is
available on https://github.com/kanezaki/rotationnet
