DiffHand: End-to-End Hand Mesh Reconstruction via Diffusion Models
On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion and flow policies for robotics
Abstract (arXiv)
Hand mesh reconstruction from the monocular image is a challenging task due to its depth ambiguity and severe occlusion, there remains a non-unique mapping between the monocular image and hand mesh. To address this, we develop DiffHand, the first diffusion-based framework that approaches hand mesh reconstruction as a denoising diffusion process. Our one-stage pipeline utilizes noise to model the uncertainty distribution of the intermediate hand mesh in a forward process. We reformulate the denoising diffusion process to gradually refine noisy hand mesh and then select mesh with the highest probability of being correct based on the image itself, rather than relying on 2D joints extracted beforehand. To better model the connectivity of hand vertices, we design a novel network module called the cross-modality decoder. Extensive experiments on the popular benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art hand mesh reconstruction approaches by achieving 5.8mm PA-MPJPE on the Freihand test set, 4.98mm PA-MPJPE on the DexYCB test set.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 43 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 May 2023.
Builds on
43 of 51 references.
References · 43
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31 more
- 2019Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognitioncited by 1,417
- 2021Label-Efficient Semantic Segmentation with Diffusion Modelscited by 495
- 2020End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformerscited by 417
- 2022DeiT III: Revenge of the ViTcited by 417
- 2021SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 415
- 2022DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detectioncited by 354
- 2021DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objectscited by 320
- 2021SegDiff: Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 279
- 2020I2L-MeshNet: Image-to-Lixel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Mesh Estimation from a Single RGB Imagecited by 274
- 2019FreiHAND: A Dataset for Markerless Capture of Hand Pose and Shape from Single RGB Imagescited by 271
- 2021Mesh Graphormercited by 264
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- 20193D Hand Shape and Pose from Images in the Wildcited by 190
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- 2021Keypoint Transformer: Solving Joint Identification in Challenging Hands and Object Interactions for Accurate 3D Pose Estimationcited by 122
- 2022DiffPose: Toward More Reliable 3D Pose Estimationcited by 99
- 2022HandOccNet: Occlusion-Robust 3D Hand Mesh Estimation Networkcited by 95
- 2021ArtiBoost: Boosting Articulated 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation via Online Exploration and Synthesiscited by 76
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 2; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.
7 papers.
- 2025T2ISafety: Benchmark for Assessing Fairness, Toxicity, and Privacy in Image Generationcited by 47
- 2023DPoser: Diffusion Model as Robust 3D Human Pose Priorcited by 17
- 2023HandDiffuse: Generative Controllers for Two-Hand Interactions via Diffusion Modelscited by 13
- 2024AttentionHand: Text-driven Controllable Hand Image Generation for 3D Hand Reconstruction in the Wildcited by 10
- 2024DiffSurf: A Transformer-based Diffusion Model for Generating and Reconstructing 3D Surfaces in Posecited by 2
- 2025MeshMamba: State Space Models for Articulated 3D Mesh Generation and Reconstructioncited by 1
- 2026AnyHand: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for RGB(-D) Hand Pose Estimationcited by 1
- 2026AnyHand: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for RGB(-D) Hand Pose Estimation26 Mar 2026
- 2025MeshMamba: State Space Models for Articulated 3D Mesh Generation and Reconstruction21 Jul 2025
- 2025T2ISafety: Benchmark for Assessing Fairness, Toxicity, and Privacy in Image Generation22 Jan 2025
- 2024DiffSurf: A Transformer-based Diffusion Model for Generating and Reconstructing 3D Surfaces in Pose27 Aug 2024
- 2024AttentionHand: Text-driven Controllable Hand Image Generation for 3D Hand Reconstruction in the Wild25 Jul 2024
- 2023DPoser: Diffusion Model as Robust 3D Human Pose Prior9 Dec 2023
- 2023HandDiffuse: Generative Controllers for Two-Hand Interactions via Diffusion Models8 Dec 2023
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025HanDrawer: Leveraging Spatial Information to Render Realistic Hands Using a Conditional Diffusion Model in Single Stage
- 2025Cascaded Diffusion Framework for Probabilistic Coarse-to-Fine Hand Pose Estimation
- 2024HHMR: Holistic Hand Mesh Recovery by Enhancing the Multimodal Controllability of Graph Diffusion Models
- 20253D Hand Mesh-Guided AI-Generated Malformed Hand Refinement with Hand Pose Transformation via Diffusion Model
- 2024RHanDS: Refining Malformed Hands for Generated Images with Decoupled Structure and Style Guidance
- 2023Denoising Diffusion for 3D Hand Pose Estimation from Images
- 2026DiffProxy: Multi-View Human Mesh Recovery via Diffusion-Generated Dense Proxies
- 2023HandRefiner: Refining Malformed Hands in Generated Images by Diffusion-based Conditional Inpainting