If you consider it, a convolutional neural network is applicable to any type of picture, including those that are not pictures of 3D scenes, such as seismic dat

If you consider it, a convolutional neural network is applicable to any type of picture, including those that are not pictures of 3D scenes, such as seismic data. So, in order to handle pictures of 3D scenes well, you are going to have to take extra assumptions about the data. This Geoffrey Hinton does, by taking the assumption that a scene consists of objects, with associated pose parameters.