# CPF: Learning a Contact Potential Field to Model the Hand-Object Interaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00924 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00924/

## Key facts

- Cited by 128 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 128)

- [ARCTIC: A Dataset for Dexterous Bimanual Hand-Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13662/) (2022)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [BundleSDF: Neural 6-DoF Tracking and 3D Reconstruction of Unknown Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14158/) (2023)
- [DexGraspNet: A Large-Scale Robotic Dexterous Grasp Dataset for General Objects Based on Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02697/) (2022)
- [OakInk: A Large-scale Knowledge Repository for Understanding Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15709/) (2022)
- [EgoVLA: Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Egocentric Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12440/) (2025)
- [D-Grasp: Physically Plausible Dynamic Grasp Synthesis for Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03028/) (2021)
- [CHORE: Contact, Human and Object REconstruction from a single RGB image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02445/) (2022)
- [TACO: Benchmarking Generalizable Bimanual Tool-ACtion-Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08399/) (2024)
- [OAKINK2: A Dataset of Bimanual Hands-Object Manipulation in Complex Task Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19417/) (2024)
- [VAT-Mart: Learning Visual Action Trajectory Proposals for Manipulating 3D ARTiculated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14440/) (2021)
- [HOLD: Category-agnostic 3D Reconstruction of Interacting Hands and Objects from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18448/) (2023)
- [ArtiBoost: Boosting Articulated 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation via Online Exploration and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05488/) (2021)
- [MobRecon: Mobile-Friendly Hand Mesh Reconstruction from Monocular Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02753/) (2021)
- [TOCH: Spatio-Temporal Object-to-Hand Correspondence for Motion Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07982/) (2022)
- [ManipTrans: Efficient Dexterous Bimanual Manipulation Transfer via Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21860/) (2025)
- [GraspXL: Generating Grasping Motions for Diverse Objects at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19649/) (2024)
- [AlignSDF: Pose-Aligned Signed Distance Fields for Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12909/) (2022)
- [Visibility Aware Human-Object Interaction Tracking from Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16479/) (2023)
- [AdaAfford: Learning to Adapt Manipulation Affordance for 3D Articulated Objects via Few-shot Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00246/) (2021)
- [ParaHome: Parameterizing Everyday Home Activities Towards 3D Generative Modeling of Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10232/) (2024)
- [Human-Aware Object Placement for Visual Environment Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03609/) (2022)
- [ArtiGrasp: Physically Plausible Synthesis of Bi-Manual Dexterous Grasping and Articulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03891/) (2023)
- [Collaborative Learning for Hand and Object Reconstruction with Attention-guided Graph Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13062/) (2022)
- [ContactGen: Generative Contact Modeling for Grasp Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03740/) (2023)
- [gSDF: Geometry-Driven Signed Distance Functions for 3D Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11970/) (2023)
- [LEMON: Learning 3D Human-Object Interaction Relation from 2D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08963/) (2023)
- [O2O-Afford: Annotation-Free Large-Scale Object-Object Affordance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15087/) (2021)
- [CORE4D: A 4D Human-Object-Human Interaction Dataset for Collaborative Object REarrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19353/) (2024)
- [Template Free Reconstruction of Human-object Interaction with Procedural Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07063/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modeling the hand-object (HO) interaction not only requires estimation of the HO pose, but also pays attention to the contact due to their interaction. Significant progress has been made in estimating hand and object separately with deep learning methods, simultaneous HO pose estimation and contact modeling has not yet been fully explored. In this paper, we present an explicit contact representation namely Contact Potential Field (CPF), and a learning-fitting hybrid framework namely MIHO to Modeling the Interaction of Hand and Object. In CPF, we treat each contacting HO vertex pair as a spring-mass system. Hence the whole system forms a potential field with minimal elastic energy at the grasp position. Extensive experiments on the two commonly used benchmarks have demonstrated that our method can achieve state-of-the-art in several reconstruction metrics, and allow us to produce more physically plausible HO pose even when the ground-truth exhibits severe interpenetration or disjointedness. Our code is available at https://github.com/lixiny/CPF.