Described is a system for object recognition in colorized point clouds. The system includes an implicit geometry engine that is configured to receive three-dimensional (3D) colorized cloud point data regarding a 3D object of interest and to convert the cloud point data into implicit representations. The engine also generates geometric features. A geometric grammar block is included to generate object cues and recognize geometric objects using geometric tokens and grammars based on object taxonomy. A visual attention cueing block is included to generate object cues based on 3D geometric properties. Finally, an object recognition block is included to perform a local search for objects using cues from the cueing block and the geometric grammar block and to classify the 3D object of interest as a particular object upon a classifier reaching a predetermined threshold.