# Contextual Attention for Hand Detection in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.04882 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04882/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Benchmark: VIdeo Segmentations and Object Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13064/) (2022)
- [WiLoR: End-to-end 3D Hand Localization and Reconstruction in-the-wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12259/) (2024)
- [HanDiffuser: Text-to-Image Generation With Realistic Hand Appearances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01693/) (2024)
- [GigaHands: A Massive Annotated Dataset of Bimanual Hand Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04244/) (2024)
- [HOI-Ref: Hand-Object Interaction Referral in Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09933/) (2024)
- [HOIST-Former: Hand-held Objects Identification, Segmentation, and Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13819/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking 2D Egocentric Hand Pose Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07337/) (2024)
- [HaGRIDv2: 1M Images for Static and Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01508/) (2024)
- [PAWS: Perception of Articulation in the Wild at Scale from Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25539/) (2026)
- [Detecting Precise Hand Touch Moments in Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12343/) (2026)
- [Improving and Evaluating Hand-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17384/) (2026)
- [Self-supervised Optimization of Hand Pose Estimation using Anatomical Features and Iterative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03007/) (2023)
- [InterTracker: Discovering and Tracking General Objects Interacting with Hands in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03061/) (2023)
- [Object Detection Approaches to Identifying Hand Images with High Forensic Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16431/) (2024)
- [OASIS: Occlusion-aware Single-image Hand Avatar Reconstruction via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29633/) (2026)
- [Functional Hand Type Prior for 3D Hand Pose Estimation and Action Recognition from Egocentric View Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34149/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Hand-CNN, a novel convolutional network architecture for detecting hand masks and predicting hand orientations in unconstrained images. Hand-CNN extends MaskRCNN with a novel attention mechanism to incorporate contextual cues in the detection process. This attention mechanism can be implemented as an efficient network module that captures non-local dependencies between features. This network module can be inserted at different stages of an object detection network, and the entire detector can be trained end-to-end. We also introduce a large-scale annotated hand dataset containing hands in unconstrained images for training and evaluation. We show that Hand-CNN outperforms existing methods on several datasets, including our hand detection benchmark and the publicly available PASCAL VOC human layout challenge. We also conduct ablation studies on hand detection to show the effectiveness of the proposed contextual attention module.