Image-processing method and apparatus for object detection or identification

A method and system for detecting the presence or absence of a target or desired object within a three-dimensional (3D) image. The 3D image is processed to extract one or more 3D feature representations, each of which is then dimensionally reduced into one or more two-dimensional (2D) feature representations. An object detection process is then performed on the 2D features map(s) to generate information about at least the presence or absence of an object within the 2D feature representations, and thereby the overall 3D image.