# Hand Avatar: Free-Pose Hand Animation and Rendering from Monocular Video

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12782 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12782/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Nov 2022.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [NeRV: Neural Reflectance and Visibility Fields for Relighting and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03927/) (2020)
- [HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving People from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04127/) (2022)
- [Non-Rigid Neural Radiance Fields: Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis of a Dynamic Scene From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12247/) (2020)
- [NeRD: Neural Reflectance Decomposition from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03918/) (2020)
- [Soft Rasterizer: A Differentiable Renderer for Image-based 3D Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01786/) (2019)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (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)
- [NeuMan: Neural Human Radiance Field from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12575/) (2022)
- [A-NeRF: Articulated Neural Radiance Fields for Learning Human Shape, Appearance, and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06199/) (2021)
- [I M Avatar: Implicit Morphable Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07471/) (2021)
- [SNARF: Differentiable Forward Skinning for Animating Non-Rigid Neural Implicit Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03953/) (2021)
- [NeRF-Editing: Geometry Editing of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04978/) (2022)
- [GRAM: Generative Radiance Manifolds for 3D-Aware Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08867/) (2021)
- [Neural Head Avatars from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01554/) (2021)
- [Neural Articulated Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03110/) (2021)
- [SCANimate: Weakly Supervised Learning of Skinned Clothed Avatar Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03313/) (2021)
- [Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02610/) (2022)
- [Grasping Field: Learning Implicit Representations for Human Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04451/) (2020)
- [MoFA: Model-based Deep Convolutional Face Autoencoder for Unsupervised Monocular Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10580/) (2017)
- [H-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Rendering and Temporal Reconstruction of Humans in Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13746/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [HOLD: Category-agnostic 3D Reconstruction of Interacting Hands and Objects from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18448/) (2023)
- [Hamba: Single-view 3D Hand Reconstruction with Graph-guided Bi-Scanning Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09646/) (2024)
- [Benchmarks and Challenges in Pose Estimation for Egocentric Hand Interactions with Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16428/) (2024)
- [HARP: Personalized Hand Reconstruction from a Monocular RGB Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09530/) (2022)
- [OHTA: One-shot Hand Avatar via Data-driven Implicit Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18969/) (2024)
- [URHand: Universal Relightable Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05334/) (2024)
- [MagicHOI: Leveraging 3D Priors for Accurate Hand-object Reconstruction from Short Monocular Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05506/) (2025)
- [Authentic Hand Avatar from a Phone Scan via Universal Hand Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07933/) (2024)
- [3D Points Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Hand Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13770/) (2023)
- [BIGS: Bimanual Category-agnostic Interaction Reconstruction from Monocular Videos via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09097/) (2025)
- [BiTT: Bi-directional Texture Reconstruction of Interacting Two Hands from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08262/) (2024)
- [HandDGP: Camera-Space Hand Mesh Prediction with Differentiable Global Positioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15844/) (2024)
- [MaskHand: Generative Masked Modeling for Robust Hand Mesh Reconstruction in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13393/) (2024)
- [Advances in Radiance Field for Dynamic Scene: From Neural Field to Gaussian Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10049/) (2025)
- [3D Visibility-aware Generalizable Neural Radiance Fields for Interacting Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00979/) (2024)
- [PAD-Hand: Physics-Aware Diffusion for Hand Motion Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26068/) (2026)
- [Generalizable Neural Human Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14199/) (2024)
- [MLPHand: Real Time Multi-View 3D Hand Mesh Reconstruction via MLP Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16137/) (2024)
- [Fine-Grained Multi-View Hand Reconstruction Using Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05680/) (2024)
- [Learning Interaction-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting for One-shot Hand Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08840/) (2024)
- [JGHand: Joint-Driven Animatable Hand Avater via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19088/) (2025)
- [SRHand: Super-Resolving Hand Images and 3D Shapes via View/Pose-aware Neural Image Representations and Explicit 3D Meshes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21859/) (2025)
- [PALM: A Dataset and Baseline for Learning Multi-subject Hand Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05403/) (2025)
- [GHOST: Fast Category-agnostic Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction from RGB Videos using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18912/) (2026)
- [Glove2Hand: Synthesizing Natural Hand-Object Interaction from Multi-Modal Sensing Gloves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20850/) (2026)
- [HiFiHR: Enhancing 3D Hand Reconstruction from a Single Image via High-Fidelity Texture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13628/) (2023)
- [XHand: Real-time Expressive Hand Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21002/) (2024)
- [HandOcc: NeRF-based Hand Rendering with Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02079/) (2025)
- [AVI-HT: Adaptive Vision-IMU Fusion for 3D Hand Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21714/) (2026)
- [NCRF: Neural Contact Radiance Fields for Free-Viewpoint Rendering of Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05532/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present HandAvatar, a novel representation for hand animation and rendering, which can generate smoothly compositional geometry and self-occlusion-aware texture. Specifically, we first develop a MANO-HD model as a high-resolution mesh topology to fit personalized hand shapes. Sequentially, we decompose hand geometry into per-bone rigid parts, and then re-compose paired geometry encodings to derive an across-part consistent occupancy field. As for texture modeling, we propose a self-occlusion-aware shading field (SelF). In SelF, drivable anchors are paved on the MANO-HD surface to record albedo information under a wide variety of hand poses. Moreover, directed soft occupancy is designed to describe the ray-to-surface relation, which is leveraged to generate an illumination field for the disentanglement of pose-independent albedo and pose-dependent illumination. Trained from monocular video data, our HandAvatar can perform free-pose hand animation and rendering while at the same time achieving superior appearance fidelity. We also demonstrate that HandAvatar provides a route for hand appearance editing. Project website: https://seanchenxy.github.io/HandAvatarWeb.