Variational autoencoders for 3D data processing

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) play an important role in high-dimensional data generation based on their ability to fuse the stochastic data representation with the power of recent deep learning techniques. The main advantages of these types of generators lie in their ability to encode the information with the possibility to decode and generalize new samples. This capability was heavily explored for 2D image processing; however, only limited research focuses on VAEs for 3D data processing. In this article, we provide a thorough review of the latest achievements in 3D data processing using VAEs. These 3D data types are mostly point clouds, meshes, and voxel grids, which are the focus of a wide range of applications, especially in robotics. First, we shortly present the basic autoencoder with the extensions towards the VAE with further subcategories relevant to discrete point cloud processing. Then, the 3D data specific VAEs are presented according to how they operate on spatial data. Finally, a few comprehensive table summarizing the methods, codes, and datasets as well as a citation map is presented for a better understanding of the VAEs applied to 3D data. The structure of the analyzed papers follows a taxonomy, which differentiates the algorithms according to their primary data types and application domains.