# DDF-HO: Hand-Held Object Reconstruction via Conditional Directed Distance Field

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08231 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08231/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [Pixel2Mesh: Generating 3D Mesh Models from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01654/) (2018)
- [3D-R2N2: A Unified Approach for Single and Multi-view 3D Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00449/) (2016)
- [Learning a Probabilistic Latent Space of Object Shapes via 3D Generative-Adversarial Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07584/) (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)
- [Learning Category-Specific Mesh Reconstruction from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07549/) (2018)
- [Understanding Human Hands in Contact at Internet Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06669/) (2020)
- [Pose2Mesh: Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose and Mesh Recovery from a 2D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09047/) (2020)
- [Learning to Estimate 3D Hand Pose from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01389/) (2017)
- [First-Person Hand Action Benchmark with RGB-D Videos and 3D Hand Pose Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02463/) (2017)
- [Detecting and Recognizing Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07333/) (2017)
- [3D Hand Shape and Pose from Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03451/) (2019)
- [ContactPose: A Dataset of Grasps with Object Contact and Hand Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09545/) (2020)
- [CodeNeRF: Disentangled Neural Radiance Fields for Object Categories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01750/) (2021)
- [Grasping Field: Learning Implicit Representations for Human Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04451/) (2020)
- [3D Hand Shape and Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00812/) (2019)
- [Learning a Predictable and Generative Vector Representation for Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08637/) (2016)
- [Pix2Vox: Context-aware 3D Reconstruction from Single and Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11153/) (2019)
- [RenderDiffusion: Image Diffusion for 3D Reconstruction, Inpainting and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09869/) (2022)
- [Perceiving 3D Human-Object Spatial Arrangements from a Single Image in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15649/) (2020)
- [GANerated Hands for Real-time 3D Hand Tracking from Monocular RGB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01057/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Semi-Supervised 3D Hand-Object Poses Estimation with Interactions in Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05266/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Open-Vocabulary Functional 3D Scene Graphs for Real-World Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19199/) (2025)
- [SecondPose: SE(3)-Consistent Dual-Stream Feature Fusion for Category-Level Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11125/) (2023)
- [BimArt: A Unified Approach for the Synthesis of 3D Bimanual Interaction with Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05066/) (2024)
- [HiPose: Hierarchical Binary Surface Encoding and Correspondence Pruning for RGB-D 6DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12588/) (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)
- [ShapeMatcher: Self-Supervised Joint Shape Canonicalization, Segmentation, Retrieval and Deformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11106/) (2023)
- [ForeHOI: Feed-forward 3D Object Reconstruction from Daily Hand-Object Interaction Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06226/) (2026)
- [KP-RED: Exploiting Semantic Keypoints for Joint 3D Shape Retrieval and Deformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10099/) (2024)
- [D-SCo: Dual-Stream Conditional Diffusion for Monocular Hand-Held Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14189/) (2023)
- [Occlusion-Aware 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation with Masked AutoEncoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10816/) (2025)
- [Semantic-Rearrangement-Based Multi-Level Alignment for Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13701/) (2024)
- [GenHOI: Generalized Hand-Object Pose Estimation with Occlusion Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19013/) (2026)
- [Hierarchical and Holistic Open-Vocabulary Functional 3D Scene Graphs for Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15753/) (2026)
- [Hand-Object Interaction in the Age of Large Foundation Models:Reconstruction, Generation, and Embodied Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28394/) (2026)
- [Probabilistic Directed Distance Fields for Ray-Based Shape Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09081/) (2024)
- [StableGrasp: Reconstructing Physically Stable Human Hand Grasps from Single Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09195/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reconstructing hand-held objects from a single RGB image is an important and challenging problem. Existing works utilizing Signed Distance Fields (SDF) reveal limitations in comprehensively capturing the complex hand-object interactions, since SDF is only reliable within the proximity of the target, and hence, infeasible to simultaneously encode local hand and object cues. To address this issue, we propose DDF-HO, a novel approach leveraging Directed Distance Field (DDF) as the shape representation. Unlike SDF, DDF maps a ray in 3D space, consisting of an origin and a direction, to corresponding DDF values, including a binary visibility signal determining whether the ray intersects the objects and a distance value measuring the distance from origin to target in the given direction. We randomly sample multiple rays and collect local to global geometric features for them by introducing a novel 2D ray-based feature aggregation scheme and a 3D intersection-aware hand pose embedding, combining 2D-3D features to model hand-object interactions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that DDF-HO consistently outperforms all baseline methods by a large margin, especially under Chamfer Distance, with about 80% leap forward. Codes are available at https://github.com/ZhangCYG/DDFHO.