# Accurate 3D Hand Pose Estimation for Whole-Body 3D Human Mesh Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.11534 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11534/

## Key facts

- Cited by 81 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 81)

- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16940/) (2023)
- [Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00818/) (2023)
- [SMPLer-X: Scaling Up Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17448/) (2023)
- [PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06400/) (2022)
- [One-Stage 3D Whole-Body Mesh Recovery with Component Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16160/) (2023)
- [Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01923/) (2022)
- [Multi-HMR: Multi-Person Whole-Body Human Mesh Recovery in a Single Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14654/) (2024)
- [Expressive Whole-Body 3D Gaussian Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21686/) (2024)
- [Human-Art: A Versatile Human-Centric Dataset Bridging Natural and Artificial Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02760/) (2023)
- [Neural Localizer Fields for Continuous 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07532/) (2024)
- [SynBody: Synthetic Dataset with Layered Human Models for 3D Human Perception and Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17368/) (2023)
- [HybrIK-X: Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics for Whole-body Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05690/) (2023)
- [3D Clothed Human Reconstruction in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10053/) (2022)
- [AiOS: All-in-One-Stage Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17934/) (2024)
- [Bringing Inputs to Shared Domains for 3D Interacting Hands Recovery in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13652/) (2023)
- [A Dataset of Relighted 3D Interacting Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17768/) (2023)
- [Learning Clothing and Pose Invariant 3D Shape Representation for Long-Term Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10658/) (2023)
- [Beyond the Contact: Discovering Comprehensive Affordance for 3D Objects from Pre-trained 2D Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12978/) (2024)
- [SMPLest-X: Ultimate Scaling for Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09782/) (2025)
- [Egocentric Whole-Body Motion Capture with FisheyeViT and Diffusion-Based Motion Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16495/) (2023)
- [WHAC: World-grounded Humans and Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12959/) (2024)
- [SignAvatars: A Large-scale 3D Sign Language Holistic Motion Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20436/) (2023)
- [Joint Reconstruction of 3D Human and Object via Contact-Based Refinement Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04819/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking and Analyzing 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation Beyond Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10529/) (2022)
- [Look Ma, no markers: holistic performance capture without the hassle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11520/) (2024)
- [GUAVA: Generalizable Upper Body 3D Gaussian Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03351/) (2025)
- [PLIKS: A Pseudo-Linear Inverse Kinematic Solver for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11734/) (2022)
- [Cyclic Test-Time Adaptation on Monocular Video for 3D Human Mesh Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06554/) (2023)
- [Disco4D: Disentangled 4D Human Generation and Animation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17280/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Whole-body 3D human mesh estimation aims to reconstruct the 3D human body, hands, and face simultaneously. Although several methods have been proposed, accurate prediction of 3D hands, which consist of 3D wrist and fingers, still remains challenging due to two reasons. First, the human kinematic chain has not been carefully considered when predicting the 3D wrists. Second, previous works utilize body features for the 3D fingers, where the body feature barely contains finger information. To resolve the limitations, we present Hand4Whole, which has two strong points over previous works. First, we design Pose2Pose, a module that utilizes joint features for 3D joint rotations. Using Pose2Pose, Hand4Whole utilizes hand MCP joint features to predict 3D wrists as MCP joints largely contribute to 3D wrist rotations in the human kinematic chain. Second, Hand4Whole discards the body feature when predicting 3D finger rotations. Our Hand4Whole is trained in an end-to-end manner and produces much better 3D hand results than previous whole-body 3D human mesh estimation methods. The codes are available here at https://github.com/mks0601/Hand4Whole_RELEASE.