Due to the complexity of hand kinematics and self-occlusion, existing 3D hand pose estimation methods based on single depth images struggle to comprehensively model the topological dependencies among hand joints. Furthermore, traditional hierarchical multitask architectures enforce a shared feature space for both 2D joint localization and depth estimation, which can induce mutual interference. To address these challenges, we propose a Kinematics-Aware Decoupled Learning Network (KAD-Net) for robust 3D hand pose estimation. Specifically, we first design a Finger Topology Constraint (FTC) module to enhance the representation of distal joints. This module utilizes three consecutive finger joints to construct a local kinematic representation to impose topological constraints, which supplements the kinematic features of the distal joints. The FTC module leverages the structural context from visible joints to assist in locating occluded distal joints, thereby improving robustness to occlusion. Additionally, we propose a task-decoupled hierarchical multitask framework. This framework separates 2D joint localization from depth estimation and incorporates a dedicated multitask learning strategy for depth regression, effectively isolating the UV and depth features to mitigate mutual interference and negative transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KAD-Net outperforms existing methods on several benchmark datasets (ICVL, NYU, and MSRA), achieving state-of-the-art accuracy in 3D hand pose estimation. Potential applications of KAD-Net include human-computer interaction, virtual reality and gesture-based control systems.
Hand-object pose estimation from monocular RGB images remains a significant challenge mainly due to the severe occlusions inherent in hand-object interactions. Existing methods do not sufficiently explore global structural perception and reasoning, which limits their effectiveness in handling occluded hand-object interactions. To address this challenge, we propose an occlusion-aware hand-object pose estimation method based on masked autoencoders, termed as HOMAE. Specifically, we propose a target-focused masking strategy that imposes structured occlusion on regions of hand-object interaction, encouraging the model to learn context-aware features and reason about the occluded structures. We further integrate multi-scale features extracted from the decoder to predict a signed distance field (SDF), capturing both global context and fine-grained geometry. To enhance geometric perception, we combine the implicit SDF with an explicit point cloud derived from the SDF, leveraging the complementary strengths of both representations. This fusion enables more robust handling of occluded regions by combining the global context from the SDF with the precise local geometry provided by the point cloud. Extensive experiments on challenging DexYCB and HO3Dv2 benchmarks demonstrate that HOMAE achieves state-of-the-art performance in hand-object pose estimation. We will release our code and model.
Monocular RGB-based hand pose estimation has emerged as a critical research frontier in computer vision. The local hand pose estimation methods predict hand poses relative to the wrist, while global hand pose estimation also requires estimating the wrist's position in the camera coordinate system. However, this camera-space estimation confronts two fundamental challenges: (1) depth ambiguity in monocular settings, and (2) the coupling effect of hand local poses and global wrist positions in the perspective projections. In particular, this coupling reflects that the projections are jointly determined by local hand poses, wrist positions, and camera intrinsics. To overcome these challenges, our framework proposes two key innovations: Transformation-Isomorphism Supervision for hand-depth information extraction and Perspective Information Embedding for resolving above coupling effect of local pose and wrist position, both integrated within the mainstream encoder-decoder architecture. Besides, we propose a novel framerate-aware multi-dataset training strategy for sequential pose refinement. Our fully integrated approach achieves at most 37.1% superiority in CS-MJE over SOTA on HO3D. Project page: https://github.com/Mine268/CS-ViT.
We introduce a novel 3D hand pose estimator that can accurately recover the shape and pose of people's hands in a room from afar, typically from fixed cameras at room corners, in extremely low-resolution and frequently occluded views. Our key idea is to fully leverage hand-body coordination, its temporal progression, and multiview observations. We achieve this with a novel Transformer-based model, in which hand and body configurations are modeled through correlations between their visual features expressed as per-view tokens, and their temporal coordination is exploited in an autoregressive manner. We introduce a novel dataset, which we refer to as REACH, Room-Environment dataset Annotated with Chest cameras for Hand pose estimation, to train and test our method. REACH is a first-of-its-kind large-scale hand pose dataset that captures accurate hand movements of 50 participants across a wide variety of daily activities. In order to avoid interfering with natural movements while annotating the hands with accurate shape and pose, we leverage concealed chest cameras. Through extensive experiments, including comparative studies with existing methods, we show that our model, REACH-Net, achieves highly accurate 3D hand pose estimation from afar. These results broaden the horizon of 3D hand pose estimation, especially towards "in-the-wild" continuous human behavior analysis.