# gSDF: Geometry-Driven Signed Distance Functions for 3D Hand-Object Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11970 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11970/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [AtlasNet: A Papier-Mach'e Approach to Learning 3D Surface Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05384/) (2018)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [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)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [What Do Single-view 3D Reconstruction Networks Learn?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03678/) (2019)
- [Integral Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08229/) (2017)
- [Learning to Estimate 3D Hand Pose from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01389/) (2017)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Volumetric Prediction for Single-Image 3D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07828/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Grasping Field: Learning Implicit Representations for Human Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04451/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Reconstructing Hand-Object Interactions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09856/) (2020)
- [H+O: Unified Egocentric Recognition of 3D Hand-Object Poses and Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05349/) (2019)
- [Leveraging Photometric Consistency over Time for Sparsely Supervised Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13449/) (2020)
- [OakInk: A Large-scale Knowledge Repository for Understanding Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15709/) (2022)
- [CPF: Learning a Contact Potential Field to Model the Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00924/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [An Outlook into the Future of Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07123/) (2023)
- [HOLD: Category-agnostic 3D Reconstruction of Interacting Hands and Objects from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18448/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-Guided Reconstruction of Everyday Hand-Object Interaction Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05663/) (2023)
- [G-HOP: Generative Hand-Object Prior for Interaction Reconstruction and Grasp Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12383/) (2024)
- [EasyHOI: Unleashing the Power of Large Models for Reconstructing Hand-Object Interactions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14280/) (2024)
- [Benchmarks and Challenges in Pose Estimation for Egocentric Hand Interactions with Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16428/) (2024)
- [ViViDex: Learning Vision-based Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15709/) (2024)
- [HO-Cap: A Capture System and Dataset for 3D Reconstruction and Pose Tracking of Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06843/) (2024)
- [Reconstructing Hand-Held Objects in 3D from Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06507/) (2024)
- [Vinci: A Real-time Embodied Smart Assistant based on Egocentric Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21080/) (2024)
- [MagicHOI: Leveraging 3D Priors for Accurate Hand-object Reconstruction from Short Monocular Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05506/) (2025)
- [Dense Hand-Object(HO) GraspNet with Full Grasping Taxonomy and Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04033/) (2024)
- [HOISDF: Constraining 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation with Global Signed Distance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17062/) (2024)
- [3D Reconstruction of Objects in Hands without Real World 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03036/) (2023)
- [MOHO: Learning Single-view Hand-held Object Reconstruction with Multi-view Occlusion-Aware Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11696/) (2023)
- [HORT: Monocular Hand-held Objects Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21313/) (2025)
- [Learning Explicit Contact for Implicit Reconstruction of Hand-held Objects from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20089/) (2023)
- [PEAR: Phrase-Based Hand-Object Interaction Anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21510/) (2024)
- [BIGS: Bimanual Category-agnostic Interaction Reconstruction from Monocular Videos via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09097/) (2025)
- [MS-MANO: Enabling Hand Pose Tracking with Biomechanical Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10227/) (2024)
- [Follow My Hold: Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction through Geometric Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18213/) (2025)
- [DiffHand: End-to-End Hand Mesh Reconstruction via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13705/) (2023)
- [Ins-HOI: Instance Aware Human-Object Interactions Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09641/) (2023)
- [FastGrasp: Efficient Grasp Synthesis with Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14786/) (2024)
- [ForeHOI: Feed-forward 3D Object Reconstruction from Daily Hand-Object Interaction Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06226/) (2026)
- [Hand-Object Interaction Controller (HOIC): Deep Reinforcement Learning for Reconstructing Interactions with Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02676/) (2024)
- [UniHOPE: A Unified Approach for Hand-Only and Hand-Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13303/) (2025)
- [Sparse multi-view hand-object reconstruction for unseen environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01353/) (2024)
- [ArtHOI: Taming Foundation Models for Monocular 4D Reconstruction of Hand-Articulated-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25791/) (2026)
- [D-SCo: Dual-Stream Conditional Diffusion for Monocular Hand-Held Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14189/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Signed distance functions (SDFs) is an attractive framework that has recently shown promising results for 3D shape reconstruction from images. SDFs seamlessly generalize to different shape resolutions and topologies but lack explicit modelling of the underlying 3D geometry. In this work, we exploit the hand structure and use it as guidance for SDF-based shape reconstruction. In particular, we address reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects from monocular RGB images. To this end, we estimate poses of hands and objects and use them to guide 3D reconstruction. More specifically, we predict kinematic chains of pose transformations and align SDFs with highly-articulated hand poses. We improve the visual features of 3D points with geometry alignment and further leverage temporal information to enhance the robustness to occlusion and motion blurs. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging ObMan and DexYCB benchmarks and demonstrate significant improvements of the proposed method over the state of the art.
