# ContactDB: Analyzing and Predicting Grasp Contact via Thermal Imaging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.06830 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06830/

## Key facts

- Cited by 147 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 147)

- [H2O: Two Hands Manipulating Objects for First Person Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11181/) (2021)
- [DexMV: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05877/) (2021)
- [Where2Act: From Pixels to Actions for Articulated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02692/) (2021)
- [Capturing and Inferring Dense Full-Body Human-Scene Contact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09553/) (2022)
- [Human-to-Robot Imitation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09450/) (2022)
- [Hand-Object Contact Consistency Reasoning for Human Grasps Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03304/) (2021)
- [ContactOpt: Optimizing Contact to Improve Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07267/) (2021)
- [DexGraspNet: A Large-Scale Robotic Dexterous Grasp Dataset for General Objects Based on Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02697/) (2022)
- [COUCH: Towards Controllable Human-Chair Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00541/) (2022)
- [OakInk: A Large-scale Knowledge Repository for Understanding Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15709/) (2022)
- [UniDexGrasp: Universal Robotic Dexterous Grasping via Learning Diverse Proposal Generation and Goal-Conditioned Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00938/) (2023)
- [D-Grasp: Physically Plausible Dynamic Grasp Synthesis for Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03028/) (2021)
- [Being-H0: Vision-Language-Action Pretraining from Large-Scale Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15597/) (2025)
- [Visual Dexterity: In-Hand Reorientation of Novel and Complex Object Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11744/) (2022)
- [On Bringing Robots Home](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16098/) (2023)
- [General In-Hand Object Rotation with Vision and Touch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09979/) (2023)
- [CHORE: Contact, Human and Object REconstruction from a single RGB image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02445/) (2022)
- [SAGA: Stochastic Whole-Body Grasping with Contact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10103/) (2021)
- [DexVIP: Learning Dexterous Grasping with Human Hand Pose Priors from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00164/) (2022)
- [Text2HOI: Text-guided 3D Motion Generation for Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00562/) (2024)
- [Robotic Telekinesis: Learning a Robotic Hand Imitator by Watching Humans on Youtube](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10448/) (2022)
- [TOCH: Spatio-Temporal Object-to-Hand Correspondence for Motion Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07982/) (2022)
- [X-Avatar: Expressive Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04805/) (2023)
- [ManipTrans: Efficient Dexterous Bimanual Manipulation Transfer via Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21860/) (2025)
- [UMPNet: Universal Manipulation Policy Network for Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05668/) (2021)
- [DiffH2O: Diffusion-Based Synthesis of Hand-Object Interactions from Textual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17827/) (2024)
- [Towards unconstrained joint hand-object reconstruction from RGB videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07044/) (2021)
- [Visibility Aware Human-Object Interaction Tracking from Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16479/) (2023)
- [GenDexGrasp: Generalizable Dexterous Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00722/) (2022)
- [ArtiGrasp: Physically Plausible Synthesis of Bi-Manual Dexterous Grasping and Articulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03891/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Grasping and manipulating objects is an important human skill. Since hand-object contact is fundamental to grasping, capturing it can lead to important insights. However, observing contact through external sensors is challenging because of occlusion and the complexity of the human hand. We present ContactDB, a novel dataset of contact maps for household objects that captures the rich hand-object contact that occurs during grasping, enabled by use of a thermal camera. Participants in our study grasped 3D printed objects with a post-grasp functional intent. ContactDB includes 3750 3D meshes of 50 household objects textured with contact maps and 375K frames of synchronized RGB-D+thermal images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale dataset that records detailed contact maps for human grasps. Analysis of this data shows the influence of functional intent and object size on grasping, the tendency to touch/avoid 'active areas', and the high frequency of palm and proximal finger contact. Finally, we train state-of-the-art image translation and 3D convolution algorithms to predict diverse contact patterns from object shape. Data, code and models are available at https://contactdb.cc.gatech.edu.