Object classification is an important step in visual recognition and semantic analysis of visual content. In this paper, we propose a method for classification of objects that is invariant to illumination color, illumination direction and viewpoint based on 3D color histogram. A 3D color histogram of an image is represented as a 2D image, to capture the color composition while preserving the neighborhood information of color bins, to realize the necessary visual cues for classification of objects. Also, the ability of convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn invariant visual patterns is exploited for object classification. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated on Amsterdam Library of Object Images (ALOI) dataset captured under various illumination conditions and angles-of-view. © 2015, Springer International Publishing Switzerland.