TouchMap-OR: Multi-View 3D Mapping of Hand-Surface Contacts
Authors: Sophokles Ktistakis, Rui Wang, Bastian Grande, Hugo Sax
Organizations: 1ETH Zurich · Institute for Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine, University Hospital Zurich · Department of Public and Global Health, University of Zurich
Abstract
Hand-surface interactions between clinicians, patients, and medical equipment play a central role in pathogen transmission during medical procedures. However, these interactions remain largely unobserved, as current infection-prevention practices rely on manual observation and cannot reconstruct detailed contact histories. In this work we formulate the problem of identity-resolved hand-surface interaction reconstruction in operating rooms and introduce TouchMap-OR, a multi-view RGB-D vision system that models clinicians, articulated hand geometry, and the semantic structure of the clinical environment to infer when and where contacts occur. The system reconstructs globally consistent multi-person 3D skeleton tracks across cameras while estimating articulated MANO hand meshes from RGB observations aligned to depth data. Multi-view hand reconstructions are fused and associated with tracked clinicians to obtain consistent left and right hand trajectories. A semantic 3D model of the operating room is built from multi-view segmentation and depth fusion, enabling reconstructed hand trajectories to be mapped to specific surfaces, including medical equipment, movable objects, and patient body sites. Temporal hand-surface proximity is used to infer contact episodes describing which clinician touched which surface and when. We evaluate TouchMap-OR on recordings from three real anesthesia inductions with manually annotated contact events. TouchMap-OR achieves 0.75 binary contact F1, outperforming tracking-based baselines while maintaining comparable multi-person tracking accuracy and achieving 0.96 identity attribution accuracy.
Touchless interaction with medical images is becoming increasingly important in the surgical field, where sterility and continuity of the operational workflow are essential requirements. This work presents a vision-based system for intraoperative navigation of medical images through hand gestures acquired using a single RGB camera. Unlike many existing solutions, the system does not require additional hardware or user-specific training. Hand tracking is performed in real time using MediaPipe Hands, which provides a 2.5D estimation of hand landmarks. Simple and intuitive gestures are then mapped into translation, rotation, and zoom commands, enabling continuous and natural interaction with the image viewer. The system architecture is independent from the visualization software and, for implementation simplicity, in this study it was integrated with PyVista. Performance was evaluated through frame-level logging and quantitative analysis of latency, stability, and interaction robustness metrics. Experimental results highlight real-time behavior, with reduced latencies and stable control, in line with the requirements of fluid interaction. The system demonstrates the feasibility of a low-cost touchless solution for intraoperative access to medical images, laying the groundwork for future clinical evaluations.
We propose a multimodal, physically grounded approach for metric-scale amodal object reconstruction and pose estimation under severe hand occlusion. Unlike prior occlusion-aware 3D generation methods that rely only on vision, we leverage physical interaction signals: proprioception provides the posed hand geometry, and multi-contact touch constrains where the object surface must lie, reducing ambiguity in occluded regions. We represent object structure as a pose-aware, camera-aligned signed distance field (SDF) and learn a compact latent space with a Structure-VAE. In this latent space, we train a conditional flow-matching diffusion model, pretraining on vision-only images and finetuning on occluded manipulation scenes while conditioning on visible RGB evidence, occluder/visibility masks, the hand latent representation, and tactile information. Crucially, we incorporate physics-based objectives and differentiable decoder-guidance during finetuning and inference to reduce hand--object interpenetration and to align the reconstructed surface with contact observations. Because our method produces a metric, physically consistent structure estimate, it integrates naturally into existing two-stage reconstruction pipelines, where a downstream module refines geometry and predicts appearance. Experiments in simulation show that adding proprioception and touch substantially improves completion under occlusion and yields physically plausible reconstructions at correct real-world scale compared to vision-only baselines; we further validate transfer by deploying the model on a real humanoid robot with an end-effector different from those used during training.
Gabriele Mario Caddeo, Pasquale Marra, Lorenzo Natale
We ask whether everyday open-world monocular videos can be turned into reusable 4D interaction primitives: articulated hand motion, object shape with 6D pose over time, and the when/where of contact. Such a capability would enable scalable mining of real interactions and, beyond reconstruction, support scene-aware synthesis and planning. However, reconstructing hand-object interaction (HOI) from challenging monocular videos remains difficult: methods often assume known objects or curated scenes, and separately estimated hands and objects easily become misaligned under clutter, occlusion, and unseen object geometries. Targeting this setting, we present CHOIR, a Contact-aware HOI Reconstruction framework for a monocular camera, using contact as an explicit coupling signal between hands and objects. CHOIR first initializes a coarse, contact-agnostic 4D HOI sequence from open-world visual priors. It then introduces a generative HOI spatial rectification module to predict ray-depth corrections and rectify hand-object relative placement, then derive initial per-frame contact correspondences on the rectified geometry. Last, a contact-aware joint optimization with dynamically updated contact constraints enforces geometric, temporal, and contact consistency. Experiments on controlled and challenging videos show that CHOIR improves object reconstruction, physical plausibility, and temporal consistency over state-of-the-art methods.