# Weakly Supervised 3D Hand Pose Estimation via Biomechanical Constraints

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.09282 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09282/

## Key facts

- Cited by 97 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 97)

- [DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04631/) (2021)
- [ARCTIC: A Dataset for Dexterous Bimanual Hand-Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13662/) (2022)
- [ContactOpt: Optimizing Contact to Improve Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07267/) (2021)
- [WiLoR: End-to-end 3D Hand Localization and Reconstruction in-the-wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12259/) (2024)
- [Keypoint Transformer: Solving Joint Identification in Challenging Hands and Object Interactions for Accurate 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14639/) (2021)
- [D-Grasp: Physically Plausible Dynamic Grasp Synthesis for Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03028/) (2021)
- [HandOccNet: Occlusion-Robust 3D Hand Mesh Estimation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14564/) (2022)
- [Interacting Attention Graph for Single Image Two-Hand Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09364/) (2022)
- [HOLD: Category-agnostic 3D Reconstruction of Interacting Hands and Objects from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18448/) (2023)
- [HaWoR: World-Space Hand Motion Reconstruction from Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02973/) (2025)
- [Model-based 3D Hand Reconstruction via Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11703/) (2021)
- [Camera-Space Hand Mesh Recovery via Semantic Aggregation and Adaptive 2D-1D Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02845/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Learning for Hand and Object Reconstruction with Attention-guided Graph Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13062/) (2022)
- [I2UV-HandNet: Image-to-UV Prediction Network for Accurate and High-fidelity 3D Hand Mesh Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03725/) (2021)
- [Dyn-HaMR: Recovering 4D Interacting Hand Motion from a Dynamic Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12861/) (2024)
- [A Skeleton-Driven Neural Occupancy Representation for Articulated Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11399/) (2021)
- [Towards Accurate Alignment in Real-time 3D Hand-Mesh Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01723/) (2021)
- [Learning to Disambiguate Strongly Interacting Hands via Probabilistic Per-pixel Part Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00434/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Temporal Transformer for 3D Hand Pose Estimation and Action Recognition from Egocentric RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09484/) (2022)
- [Benchmarks and Challenges in Pose Estimation for Egocentric Hand Interactions with Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16428/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Representation Learning for Hand Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04324/) (2021)
- [Learning to Imitate Object Interactions from Internet Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13225/) (2022)
- [A Probabilistic Attention Model with Occlusion-aware Texture Regression for 3D Hand Reconstruction from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14299/) (2023)
- [Hand Image Understanding via Deep Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11646/) (2021)
- [SignAvatars: A Large-scale 3D Sign Language Holistic Motion Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20436/) (2023)
- [Weakly-Supervised Physically Unconstrained Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09803/) (2021)
- [Consistent 3D Hand Reconstruction in Video via self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09548/) (2022)
- [HARP: Personalized Hand Reconstruction from a Monocular RGB Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09530/) (2022)
- [Monocular 3D Reconstruction of Interacting Hands via Collision-Aware Factorized Refinements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00763/) (2021)
- [A Simple Baseline for Efficient Hand Mesh Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01813/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating 3D hand pose from 2D images is a difficult, inverse problem due to the inherent scale and depth ambiguities. Current state-of-the-art methods train fully supervised deep neural networks with 3D ground-truth data. However, acquiring 3D annotations is expensive, typically requiring calibrated multi-view setups or labor intensive manual annotations. While annotations of 2D keypoints are much easier to obtain, how to efficiently leverage such weakly-supervised data to improve the task of 3D hand pose prediction remains an important open question. The key difficulty stems from the fact that direct application of additional 2D supervision mostly benefits the 2D proxy objective but does little to alleviate the depth and scale ambiguities. Embracing this challenge we propose a set of novel losses. We show by extensive experiments that our proposed constraints significantly reduce the depth ambiguity and allow the network to more effectively leverage additional 2D annotated images. For example, on the challenging freiHAND dataset using additional 2D annotation without our proposed biomechanical constraints reduces the depth error by only 15%, whereas the error is reduced significantly by 50% when the proposed biomechanical constraints are used.