# Efficient Annotation and Learning for 3D Hand Pose Estimation: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02257 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02257/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 115 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [GRAB: A Dataset of Whole-Body Human Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11200/) (2020)
- [Learning joint reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05767/) (2019)
- [DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04631/) (2021)
- [Assembly101: A Large-Scale Multi-View Video Dataset for Understanding Procedural Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14712/) (2022)
- [FreiHAND: A Dataset for Markerless Capture of Hand Pose and Shape from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04349/) (2019)
- [H2O: Two Hands Manipulating Objects for First Person Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11181/) (2021)
- [InterHand2.6M: A Dataset and Baseline for 3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09309/) (2020)
- [Learning to Estimate 3D Hand Pose from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01389/) (2017)
- [Hand Keypoint Detection in Single Images using Multiview Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07809/) (2017)
- [First-Person Hand Action Benchmark with RGB-D Videos and 3D Hand Pose Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02463/) (2017)
- [DexMV: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05877/) (2021)
- [3D Hand Shape and Pose from Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03451/) (2019)
- [Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02610/) (2022)
- [3D Hand Shape and Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00812/) (2019)
- [Learnable Triangulation of Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05754/) (2019)
- [GANerated Hands for Real-time 3D Hand Tracking from Monocular RGB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01057/) (2017)
- [Weakly-Supervised Mesh-Convolutional Hand Reconstruction in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01946/) (2020)
- [H+O: Unified Egocentric Recognition of 3D Hand-Object Poses and Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05349/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised 3D Hand-Object Poses Estimation with Interactions in Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05266/) (2021)
- [Keypoint Transformer: Solving Joint Identification in Challenging Hands and Object Interactions for Accurate 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14639/) (2021)
- [DexPilot: Vision Based Teleoperation of Dexterous Robotic Hand-Arm System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03135/) (2019)
- [Hand Pose Estimation via Latent 2.5D Heatmap Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09534/) (2018)
- [Weakly Supervised 3D Hand Pose Estimation via Biomechanical Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09282/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [AssemblyHands: Towards Egocentric Activity Understanding via 3D Hand Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12301/) (2023)
- [Benchmarks and Challenges in Pose Estimation for Egocentric Hand Interactions with Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16428/) (2024)
- [Markerless Multi-view 3D Human Pose Estimation: a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03817/) (2024)
- [SiMHand: Mining Similar Hands for Large-Scale 3D Hand Pose Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15251/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning Approaches for Seizure Video Analysis: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10930/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking 2D Egocentric Hand Pose Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07337/) (2024)
- [Posture-Informed Muscular Force Learning for Robust Hand Pressure Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23629/) (2024)
- [Leveraging RGB Images for Pre-Training of Event-Based Hand Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16949/) (2025)
- [Pre-Training for 3D Hand Pose Estimation with Contrastive Learning on Large-Scale Hand Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09714/) (2024)
- [Generative Modeling of Shape-Dependent Self-Contact Human Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23393/) (2025)
- [Affordance-Guided Diffusion Prior for 3D Hand Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00506/) (2025)
- [AVI-HT: Adaptive Vision-IMU Fusion for 3D Hand Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21714/) (2026)
- [Towards in-the-wild Egocentric 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30598/) (2026)
- [Hand Visibility Detector: Per-Keypoint Visibility Estimation for Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11574/) (2026)
- [Hand-Object Interaction in the Age of Large Foundation Models:Reconstruction, Generation, and Embodied Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28394/) (2026)
- [Mesh Represented Recycle Learning for 3D Hand Pose and Mesh Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12189/) (2023)
- [DF-Mamba: Deformable State Space Modeling for 3D Hand Pose Estimation in Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02727/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this survey, we present a systematic review of 3D hand pose estimation from the perspective of efficient annotation and learning. 3D hand pose estimation has been an important research area owing to its potential to enable various applications, such as video understanding, AR/VR, and robotics. However, the performance of models is tied to the quality and quantity of annotated 3D hand poses. Under the status quo, acquiring such annotated 3D hand poses is challenging, e.g., due to the difficulty of 3D annotation and the presence of occlusion. To reveal this problem, we review the pros and cons of existing annotation methods classified as manual, synthetic-model-based, hand-sensor-based, and computational approaches. Additionally, we examine methods for learning 3D hand poses when annotated data are scarce, including self-supervised pretraining, semi-supervised learning, and domain adaptation. Based on the study of efficient annotation and learning, we further discuss limitations and possible future directions in this field.