What's in Your Hands? 3D Reconstruction of Generic Objects in Hands

Yufei Ye, Abhinav Gupta, Shubham Tulsiani; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 3895-3905

Our work aims to reconstruct hand-held objects given a single RGB image. In contrast to prior works that typically assume known 3D templates and reduce the problem to 3D pose estimation, our work reconstructs generic hand-held objects without knowing their 3D templates. Our key insight is that hand articulation is highly predictive of the object shape, and we propose an approach that conditionally reconstructs the object based on the articulation and the visual input. Given an image depicting a hand-held object, we first use off-the-shelf systems to estimate the underlying hand pose and then infer the object shape in a normalized hand-centric coordinate frame. We parameterized the object by signed distance which is inferred by an implicit network that leverages the information from both visual feature and articulation-aware coordinates to process a query point. We perform experiments across three datasets and show that our method consistently outperforms baselines and is able to reconstruct a diverse set of objects. We analyze the benefits and robustness of explicit articulation conditioning and also show that this allows the hand pose estimation to further improve in test-time optimization.