The ModelNet40 dataset contains synthetic object point clouds. As the most widely used benchmark for point cloud analysis, ModelNet40 is popular because of its various categories, clean shapes, well-constructed dataset, etc. The original ModelNet40 consists of 12,311 CAD-generated meshes in 40 categories (such as airplane, car, plant, lamp), of which 9,843 are used for training while the rest 2,468 are reserved for testing. The corresponding point cloud data points are uniformly sampled from the mesh surfaces, and then further preprocessed by moving to the origin and scaling into a unit sphere.
Source: Geometric Feedback Network for Point Cloud Classification