# Analysis of the hands in egocentric vision: A survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.10867 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10867/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [An Outlook into the Future of Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07123/) (2023)
- [Human Hands as Probes for Interactive Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09120/) (2021)
- [Predicting the Future from First Person (Egocentric) Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13411/) (2021)
- [Egocentric Prediction of Action Target in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13116/) (2022)
- [Grounded Affordance from Exocentric View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13196/) (2022)
- [Vinci: A Real-time Embodied Smart Assistant based on Egocentric Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21080/) (2024)
- [In My Perspective, In My Hands: Accurate Egocentric 2D Hand Pose and Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09308/) (2024)
- [CREW: Facilitating Human-AI Teaming Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00170/) (2024)
- [A Survey on 3D Egocentric Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17893/) (2024)
- [Unified Learning Approach for Egocentric Hand Gesture Recognition and Fingertip Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02047/) (2021)
- [Ultra-Range Gesture Recognition using a Web-Camera in Human-Robot Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15361/) (2023)
- [Foreground-Aware Stylization and Consensus Pseudo-Labeling for Domain Adaptation of First-Person Hand Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02718/) (2021)
- [Uni-Hand: Universal Hand Motion Forecasting in Egocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12878/) (2025)
- [Building Egocentric Procedural AI Assistant: Methods, Benchmarks, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13261/) (2025)
- [EgoEvGesture: Gesture Recognition Based on Egocentric Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12419/) (2025)
- [Measuring hand use in the home after cervical spinal cord injury using egocentric video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16996/) (2022)
- [A Literature Review of Literature Reviews in Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12928/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking 2D Egocentric Hand Pose Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07337/) (2024)
- [Pro2Assist: Continuous Step-aware Proactive Assistance with Multi-modal Egocentric Perception for Long-horizon Procedural Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04227/) (2026)
- [EgoLoc: A Generalizable Solution for Temporal Interaction Localization in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12349/) (2025)
- [Gestura: A LVLM-Powered System Bridging Motion and Semantics for Real-Time Free-Form Gesture Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21814/) (2025)
- [x-RAGE: eXtended Reality -- Action & Gesture Events Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19486/) (2024)
- [Testing Human-Hand Segmentation on In-Distribution and Out-of-Distribution Data in Human-Robot Interactions Using a Deep Ensemble Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07713/) (2025)
- [The First EgoCross Challenge at EgoVis 2026: Cross-Domain Egocentric Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04589/) (2026)
- [EventEgoHands++: Event-based Egocentric 3D Hand Mesh Reconstruction with Real Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17189/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Egocentric vision (a.k.a. first-person vision - FPV) applications have thrived over the past few years, thanks to the availability of affordable wearable cameras and large annotated datasets. The position of the wearable camera (usually mounted on the head) allows recording exactly what the camera wearers have in front of them, in particular hands and manipulated objects. This intrinsic advantage enables the study of the hands from multiple perspectives: localizing hands and their parts within the images; understanding what actions and activities the hands are involved in; and developing human-computer interfaces that rely on hand gestures. In this survey, we review the literature that focuses on the hands using egocentric vision, categorizing the existing approaches into: localization (where are the hands or parts of them?); interpretation (what are the hands doing?); and application (e.g., systems that used egocentric hand cues for solving a specific problem). Moreover, a list of the most prominent datasets with hand-based annotations is provided.