Patent ID: 8452078

Claim:
A method, comprising: imaging an object in three-dimensions by collecting three-dimensional data points of the object; binning the data points of the imaged object into three-dimensional bins having a predetermined three-dimensional size to create a binned scanned object in a three-dimensional bin space; determining a density value of the data in each of the bins by calculating a number of the data points in each of the bins; inputting the density value of each of the bins into a first layer of a computational system including a corresponding processing element for each of the bins; calculating outputs of the processing elements, wherein all of the processing elements have weights of a same value connecting the processing elements to corresponding density values; and communicating an estimated class of the scanned object based on the calculated outputs, wherein the calculating includes: performing a nonlinear transformation on a product of a connected weight and the density value for each bin; sub-sampling the outputs by averaging the outputs over two adjacent processing elements in three dimensions; and repeating the calculating process using additional layers of the computational system, the output of the computational system connected to all processing elements of a last layer of the computational system.