# Learning Explicit Contact for Implicit Reconstruction of Hand-held Objects from Monocular Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.20089 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20089/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Pixel2Mesh: Generating 3D Mesh Models from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01654/) (2018)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [3D-R2N2: A Unified Approach for Single and Multi-view 3D Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00449/) (2016)
- [AtlasNet: A Papier-Mach'e Approach to Learning 3D Surface Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05384/) (2018)
- [Learning joint reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05767/) (2019)
- [OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05009/) (2016)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04631/) (2021)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Shape As Points: A Differentiable Poisson Solver](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03452/) (2021)
- [Capturing and Inferring Dense Full-Body Human-Scene Contact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09553/) (2022)
- [Grasping Field: Learning Implicit Representations for Human Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04451/) (2020)
- [Neural Human Performer: Learning Generalizable Radiance Fields for Human Performance Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07448/) (2021)
- [PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06400/) (2022)
- [Weakly-Supervised Mesh-Convolutional Hand Reconstruction in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01946/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Photometric Consistency over Time for Sparsely Supervised Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13449/) (2020)
- [ContactOpt: Optimizing Contact to Improve Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07267/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Learning Dense Hand Contact Estimation from Imbalanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11152/) (2025)
- [HORT: Monocular Hand-held Objects Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21313/) (2025)
- [End-to-End HOI Reconstruction Transformer with Graph-based Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06012/) (2025)
- [Ins-HOI: Instance Aware Human-Object Interactions Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09641/) (2023)
- [FunHOI: Annotation-Free 3D Hand-Object Interaction Generation via Functional Text Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20805/) (2025)
- [HOPE: Hand-Object Pressure Estimation from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06192/) (2026)
- [Kinematics-based 3D Human-Object Interaction Reconstruction from Single View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14043/) (2024)
- [A Versatile and Differentiable Hand-Object Interaction Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16855/) (2024)
- [VPHO: Joint Visual-Physical Cue Learning and Aggregation for Hand-Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12030/) (2025)
- [EgoPHI: Estimating 3D Hand-Object Contact and Force from Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13014/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reconstructing hand-held objects from monocular RGB images is an appealing yet challenging task. In this task, contacts between hands and objects provide important cues for recovering the 3D geometry of the hand-held objects. Though recent works have employed implicit functions to achieve impressive progress, they ignore formulating contacts in their frameworks, which results in producing less realistic object meshes. In this work, we explore how to model contacts in an explicit way to benefit the implicit reconstruction of hand-held objects. Our method consists of two components: explicit contact prediction and implicit shape reconstruction. In the first part, we propose a new subtask of directly estimating 3D hand-object contacts from a single image. The part-level and vertex-level graph-based transformers are cascaded and jointly learned in a coarse-to-fine manner for more accurate contact probabilities. In the second part, we introduce a novel method to diffuse estimated contact states from the hand mesh surface to nearby 3D space and leverage diffused contact probabilities to construct the implicit neural representation for the manipulated object. Benefiting from estimating the interaction patterns between the hand and the object, our method can reconstruct more realistic object meshes, especially for object parts that are in contact with hands. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks show that the proposed method outperforms the current state of the arts by a great margin. Our code is publicly available at https://junxinghu.github.io/projects/hoi.html.