# THOR-Net: End-to-end Graformer-based Realistic Two Hands and Object Reconstruction with Self-supervision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13853 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13853/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [Pixel2Mesh: Generating 3D Mesh Models from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01654/) (2018)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (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)
- [H2O: Two Hands Manipulating Objects for First Person Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11181/) (2021)
- [First-Person Hand Action Benchmark with RGB-D Videos and 3D Hand Pose Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02463/) (2017)
- [ContactPose: A Dataset of Grasps with Object Contact and Hand Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09545/) (2020)
- [Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02610/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Leveraging Photometric Consistency over Time for Sparsely Supervised Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13449/) (2020)
- [Keypoint Transformer: Solving Joint Identification in Challenging Hands and Object Interactions for Accurate 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14639/) (2021)
- [HOPE-Net: A Graph-based Model for Hand-Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00060/) (2020)
- [HandOccNet: Occlusion-Robust 3D Hand Mesh Estimation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14564/) (2022)
- [ArtiBoost: Boosting Articulated 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation via Online Exploration and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05488/) (2021)
- [Towards unconstrained joint hand-object reconstruction from RGB videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07044/) (2021)
- [EventHands: Real-Time Neural 3D Hand Pose Estimation from an Event Stream](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06475/) (2020)
- [HandVoxNet: Deep Voxel-Based Network for 3D Hand Shape and Pose Estimation from a Single Depth Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01588/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18259/) (2023)
- [OAKINK2: A Dataset of Bimanual Hands-Object Manipulation in Complex Task Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19417/) (2024)
- [The Invisible EgoHand: 3D Hand Forecasting through EgoBody Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08654/) (2025)
- [Get a Grip: Reconstructing Hand-Object Stable Grasps in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15719/) (2023)
- [PAD-Hand: Physics-Aware Diffusion for Hand Motion Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26068/) (2026)
- [SurgeoNet: Realtime 3D Pose Estimation of Articulated Surgical Instruments from Stereo Images using a Synthetically-trained Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01293/) (2024)
- [Reconstructing Objects along Hand Interaction Timelines in Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07394/) (2025)
- [Towards Egocentric 3D Hand Pose Estimation in Unseen Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06537/) (2026)
- [GHOST: Fast Category-agnostic Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction from RGB Videos using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18912/) (2026)
- [ShapeGraFormer: GraFormer-Based Network for Hand-Object Reconstruction from a Single Depth Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11811/) (2023)
- [SHARP: Segmentation of Hands and Arms by Range using Pseudo-Depth for Enhanced Egocentric 3D Hand Pose Estimation and Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10037/) (2024)
- [A Versatile and Differentiable Hand-Object Interaction Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16855/) (2024)
- [Hand-Object Interaction in the Age of Large Foundation Models:Reconstruction, Generation, and Embodied Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28394/) (2026)
- [ShaRPy: Shape Reconstruction and Hand Pose Estimation from RGB-D with Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10042/) (2023)
- [Fast-HaMeR: Boosting Hand Mesh Reconstruction using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16444/) (2026)
- [EventEgoHands++: Event-based Egocentric 3D Hand Mesh Reconstruction with Real Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17189/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Realistic reconstruction of two hands interacting with objects is a new and challenging problem that is essential for building personalized Virtual and Augmented Reality environments. Graph Convolutional networks (GCNs) allow for the preservation of the topologies of hands poses and shapes by modeling them as a graph. In this work, we propose the THOR-Net which combines the power of GCNs, Transformer, and self-supervision to realistically reconstruct two hands and an object from a single RGB image. Our network comprises two stages; namely the features extraction stage and the reconstruction stage. In the features extraction stage, a Keypoint RCNN is used to extract 2D poses, features maps, heatmaps, and bounding boxes from a monocular RGB image. Thereafter, this 2D information is modeled as two graphs and passed to the two branches of the reconstruction stage. The shape reconstruction branch estimates meshes of two hands and an object using our novel coarse-to-fine GraFormer shape network. The 3D poses of the hands and objects are reconstructed by the other branch using a GraFormer network. Finally, a self-supervised photometric loss is used to directly regress the realistic textured of each vertex in the hands' meshes. Our approach achieves State-of-the-art results in Hand shape estimation on the HO-3D dataset (10.0mm) exceeding ArtiBoost (10.8mm). It also surpasses other methods in hand pose estimation on the challenging two hands and object (H2O) dataset by 5mm on the left-hand pose and 1 mm on the right-hand pose.