Recovering Physically Plausible Human-Object Interactions from Monocular Videos

Recovering 4D human-object interaction (HOI) from monocular video is a key step toward scalable 3D content creation, embodied AI, and simulation-based learning. Recent methods can reconstruct temporally coherent human and object trajectories, but these trajectories often remain visual artifacts while failing to preserve stable contact, functional manipulation, or physical plausibility when used as reference motions for humanoid-object simulation. This reveals a fundamental interaction gap: HOI reconstruction should not stop at tracking a human and an object, but should recover the relation that makes their motion a coherent interaction. We introduce $\textbf{HA-HOI}$, a framework for reconstructing physically plausible 4D HOI animation from in-the-wild monocular videos. Instead of treating the human and object as independent entities in an ambiguous monocular 3D space, we propose a $\textit{human-first, object-follow}$ formulation. The human motion is recovered as the interaction anchor, and the object is reconstructed, aligned, and refined relative to the human action. The resulting kinematic trajectory is then projected into a physics-based humanoid-object simulation, where it acts as a teacher trajectory for stable physical rollout. Across benchmark and in-the-wild videos, $\textbf{HA-HOI}$ improves human-object alignment, contact consistency, temporal stability, and simulation readiness over prior monocular HOI reconstruction methods. By moving beyond visually plausible trajectory recovery toward physically grounded interaction animation, our work takes a step toward turning general monocular HOI videos into scalable demonstrations for humanoid-object behavior. Project page: https://knoxzhao.github.io/real2sim_in_HOI/

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.

Reconstructing people, objects, and their interactions in 3D is a long-standing goal for intelligent systems. Often the input is RGB video from a moving camera, making the task ill-posed; depth is ambiguous, humans and objects occlude each other, and camera and object motion entangle to create apparent motion. Most prior work addresses humans or objects in isolation, ignoring their interplay, or assumes known 3D shapes or cameras, which is impractical for real-world applications. We develop RHINO (Reconstructing Human Interactions with Novel Objects), a three-step framework that recovers in 3D a human, novel (unseen) manipulated object, and static scene in a common world frame from a monocular RGB video. First, we leverage 3D-aware foundation models to obtain cues that stabilize Structure-from-Motion (SfM) even for low-texture regions; this yields a coarse shape and apparent motion of a manipulated object from foreground pixels, and a coarse scene shape and camera motion from background pixels. Second, we estimate a human in the camera frame via an off-the-shelf method, and subtract the camera motion from apparent motion to extract the object motion; this registers the human, object, and coarse scene shapes into a common world frame. Third, we refine shapes using a compositional neural field with per-component signed-distance fields. The latter further enables differentiable contact priors that attract surfaces while penalizing interpenetration, improving the physical plausibility of the final reconstruction. For evaluation, we capture a new dataset of handheld monocular videos synchronized with a volumetric 4D capture stage, providing ground-truth shape and camera motion. RHINO outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on novel-view synthesis and 4D reconstruction. Ablations show that each stage contributes substantially. Code and data are available at https://lxxue.github.io/RHINO.