We revisit the role of texture in monocular 3D hand reconstruction, not as an afterthought for photorealism, but as a dense, spatially grounded cue that can actively support pose and shape estimation. Our observation is simple: even in high-performing models, the overlay between predicted hand geometry and image appearance is often imperfect, suggesting that texture alignment may be an underused supervisory signal. We propose a lightweight texture module that embeds per-pixel observations into UV texture space and enables a novel dense alignment loss between predicted and observed hand appearances. Our approach assumes access to a differentiable rendering pipeline and a model that maps images to 3D hand meshes with known topology, allowing us to back-project a textured hand onto the image and perform pixel-based alignment. The module is self-contained and easily pluggable into existing reconstruction pipelines. To isolate and highlight the value of texture-guided supervision, we augment HaMeR, a high-performing yet unadorned transformer architecture for 3D hand pose estimation. The resulting system improves both accuracy and realism, demonstrating the value of appearance-guided alignment in hand reconstruction.
Monocular 3D hand reconstruction is intrinsically a geometric problem, yet RGB appearance features alone often struggle to resolve severe ambiguities caused by self-occlusions and hand-object interactions. While introducing depth can explicitly provide spatial cues, raw sensor-captured depth maps are extensively noisy and incomplete, limiting their usefulness for fine-grained hand reconstruction. To bridge this gap, we propose GeoHand, a novel framework that unlocks high-quality geometric priors from a frozen foundational monocular geometry estimator (MoGe2). Recognizing that these priors are oriented toward general scenes, we introduce a map-level GeoAdapter to recalibrate the spatial features, specifically adapting them for detailed hand reconstruction. Furthermore, to systematically integrate these adapted priors without overwhelming intrinsic RGB appearance cues, we employ a gated cross-modal token fusion strategy. Finally, to secure precise local articulation, we design a Keypoint-Queried Iterative Refiner (KQIR) that uses projected joint locations to query geometry-aware image features for spatial correction. By combining global geometric disambiguation with local refinement in a unified pipeline, GeoHand achieves state-of-the-art performance on FreiHAND, DexYCB, and HO3Dv3, especially under severe occlusions and hand-object interactions.
Accurate monocular 4D hand reconstruction remains challenging. Per-frame discriminative regressors lack temporal context and often produce jittery predictions. Temporal models improve consistency by aggregating information across frames, but they are typically deterministic regressors, making them vulnerable to ambiguous observations caused by occlusion and motion blur. Generative modeling offers a natural alternative by learning a prior over plausible hand motion sequences, enabling coherent hand-state recovery when visual evidence is incomplete or unreliable. Motivated by this observation, we present HandFlow, a fully generative flow-matching framework for temporally coherent 3D hand pose and shape estimation from monocular video. Given visual and skeletal observations, HandFlow denoises an entire temporal window of MANO parameters through a single ODE integration. To support this, we use a Flux-style dual-stream transformer that attends across the full sequence to capture long-range dependencies without autoregressive decoding, and a confidence-aware continuous masking mechanism that blends observed features with learnable mask tokens to handle noisy or missing observations. Experiments on DexYCB and HOT3D show that HandFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particularly large gains in world-space accuracy and temporal smoothness. It reduces world-space pose error by over 30% compared with the strongest baseline and achieves the lowest acceleration error among all evaluated methods, while remaining competitive in per-frame pose accuracy. Moreover, on a single GPU HandFlow reconstructs a 150-frame sequence at 47 fps, about 12x faster than the fastest prior video-based method, with reconstruction itself accounting for only a small fraction of the end-to-end latency.
How can we reconstruct 3D hand poses when large portions of the hand are heavily occluded by itself or by objects? Humans often resolve such ambiguities by leveraging contextual knowledge -- such as affordances, where an object's shape and function suggest how the object is typically grasped. Inspired by this observation, we propose a generative prior for hand pose refinement guided by affordance-aware textual descriptions of hand-object interactions (HOI). Our method employs a diffusion-based generative model that learns the distribution of plausible hand poses conditioned on affordance descriptions, which are inferred from a large vision-language model (VLM). This enables the refinement of occluded regions into more accurate and functionally coherent hand poses. Extensive experiments on HOGraspNet, a 3D hand-affordance dataset with severe occlusions, demonstrate that our affordance-guided refinement significantly improves hand pose estimation over both recent regression methods and diffusion-based refinement lacking contextual reasoning.