# HandNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Animatable Interacting Hands

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.13825 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13825/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [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)
- [GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12100/) (2020)
- [Neural Scene Flow Fields for Space-Time View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13084/) (2020)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [IBRNet: Learning Multi-View Image-Based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13090/) (2021)
- [UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10078/) (2021)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (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)
- [Dynamic View Synthesis from Dynamic Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06468/) (2021)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [Dense Depth Priors for Neural Radiance Fields from Sparse Input Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03288/) (2021)
- [Neural Radiance Flow for 4D View Synthesis and Video Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09790/) (2020)
- [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)
- [HeadNeRF: A Real-time NeRF-based Parametric Head Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05637/) (2021)
- [HyperNeRF: A Higher-Dimensional Representation for Topologically Varying Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13228/) (2021)
- [Neural Articulated Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03110/) (2021)
- [Neural Feature Fusion Fields: 3D Distillation of Self-Supervised 2D Image Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03494/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Motion-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting for Efficient Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11447/) (2024)
- [HOLD: Category-agnostic 3D Reconstruction of Interacting Hands and Objects from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18448/) (2023)
- [Benchmarks and Challenges in Pose Estimation for Egocentric Hand Interactions with Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16428/) (2024)
- [OHTA: One-shot Hand Avatar via Data-driven Implicit Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18969/) (2024)
- [MagicHOI: Leveraging 3D Priors for Accurate Hand-object Reconstruction from Short Monocular Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05506/) (2025)
- [Neural Radiance Field-based Visual Rendering: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00714/) (2024)
- [Neural Radiance Fields for the Real World: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13104/) (2025)
- [3D Points Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Hand Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13770/) (2023)
- [BiTT: Bi-directional Texture Reconstruction of Interacting Two Hands from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08262/) (2024)
- [TalkinNeRF: Animatable Neural Fields for Full-Body Talking Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16666/) (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)
- [Advances in 4D Representation: Geometry, Motion, and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19255/) (2025)
- [Generalizable Neural Human Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14199/) (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)
- [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)
- [Towards in-the-wild Egocentric 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30598/) (2026)
- [HandSCS: Structural Coordinate Space for Animatable Hand Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14736/) (2025)
- [NBAvatar: Neural Billboards Avatars with Realistic Hand-Face Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12063/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Monocular 3D Hand Reconstruction with Learned Texture Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09629/) (2025)
- [WildGHand: Learning Anti-Perturbation Gaussian Hand Avatars from Monocular In-the-Wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20556/) (2026)
- [PHAF-Personalized Hand Avatars in a Flash](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03420/) (2026)
- [Hand-4DGS: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for 4D Hand Reconstruction from Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19156/) (2026)
- [PHOSA: Photorealistic 3D Sign Avatar Modeling and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29292/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel framework to reconstruct accurate appearance and geometry with neural radiance fields (NeRF) for interacting hands, enabling the rendering of photo-realistic images and videos for gesture animation from arbitrary views. Given multi-view images of a single hand or interacting hands, an off-the-shelf skeleton estimator is first employed to parameterize the hand poses. Then we design a pose-driven deformation field to establish correspondence from those different poses to a shared canonical space, where a pose-disentangled NeRF for one hand is optimized. Such unified modeling efficiently complements the geometry and texture cues in rarely-observed areas for both hands. Meanwhile, we further leverage the pose priors to generate pseudo depth maps as guidance for occlusion-aware density learning. Moreover, a neural feature distillation method is proposed to achieve cross-domain alignment for color optimization. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the merits of our proposed HandNeRF and report a series of state-of-the-art results both qualitatively and quantitatively on the large-scale InterHand2.6M dataset.