# URHand: Universal Relightable Hands

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05334 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05334/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [Neural Fields in Visual Computing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11426/) (2021)
- [Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05744/) (2021)
- [Advances in Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05849/) (2021)
- [PhySG: Inverse Rendering with Spherical Gaussians for Physics-based Material Editing and Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00674/) (2021)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (2021)
- [I2L-MeshNet: Image-to-Lixel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Mesh Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03713/) (2020)
- [Geometric GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02894/) (2017)
- [TensoIR: Tensorial Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12461/) (2023)
- [GANerated Hands for Real-time 3D Hand Tracking from Monocular RGB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01057/) (2017)
- [Robust High-Resolution Video Matting with Temporal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11515/) (2021)
- [SfSNet: Learning Shape, Reflectance and Illuminance of Faces in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01261/) (2017)
- [V2V-PoseNet: Voxel-to-Voxel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Hand and Human Pose Estimation from a Single Depth Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07399/) (2017)
- [Learning Physics-guided Face Relighting under Directional Light](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03355/) (2019)
- [Real-time Hand Tracking under Occlusion from an Egocentric RGB-D Sensor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02201/) (2017)
- [Neural Light Transport for Relighting and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03806/) (2020)
- [Real-time Pose and Shape Reconstruction of Two Interacting Hands With a Single Depth Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08059/) (2021)
- [Learning to Relight Portrait Images via a Virtual Light Stage and Synthetic-to-Real Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10510/) (2022)
- [LISA: Learning Implicit Shape and Appearance of Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01695/) (2022)
- [Geometry-Consistent Neural Shape Representation with Implicit Displacement Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05187/) (2021)
- [Rethinking on Multi-Stage Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00148/) (2019)
- [A Skeleton-Driven Neural Occupancy Representation for Articulated Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11399/) (2021)
- [DeepHandMesh: A Weakly-supervised Deep Encoder-Decoder Framework for High-fidelity Hand Mesh Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08213/) (2020)
- [Face Relighting with Geometrically Consistent Shadows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16681/) (2022)
- [Towards High Fidelity Face Relighting with Realistic Shadows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00825/) (2021)
- [Hand Avatar: Free-Pose Hand Animation and Rendering from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12782/) (2022)
- [A Dataset of Relighted 3D Interacting Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17768/) (2023)

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

- [Expressive Whole-Body 3D Gaussian Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21686/) (2024)
- [Vid2Avatar-Pro: Authentic Avatar from Videos in the Wild via Universal Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01610/) (2025)
- [MaterialFusion: Enhancing Inverse Rendering with Material Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15273/) (2024)
- [Authentic Hand Avatar from a Phone Scan via Universal Hand Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07933/) (2024)
- [HumanOLAT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Full-Body Human Relighting and Novel-View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09137/) (2025)
- [Advances in Radiance Field for Dynamic Scene: From Neural Field to Gaussian Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10049/) (2025)
- [Parametric Gaussian Human Model: Generalizable Prior for Efficient and Realistic Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06645/) (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)
- [PALM: A Dataset and Baseline for Learning Multi-subject Hand Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05403/) (2025)
- [XHand: Real-time Expressive Hand Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21002/) (2024)
- [DNF-Avatar: Distilling Neural Fields for Real-time Animatable Avatar Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10486/) (2025)
- [Relightable Holoported Characters: Capturing and Relighting Dynamic Human Performance from Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00255/) (2025)
- [HSImul3R: Physics-in-the-Loop Reconstruction of Simulation-Ready Human-Scene Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15612/) (2026)
- [POLAR: A Portrait OLAT Dataset and Generative Framework for Illumination-Aware Face Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13192/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Monocular 3D Hand Reconstruction with Learned Texture Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09629/) (2025)
- [Animated 3DGS Avatars in Diverse Scenes with Consistent Lighting and Shadows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01660/) (2026)
- [RAGA: Real Time Ray Traced Gaussian Shadow Casting for 3DGS Avatar-Scene Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29329/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing photorealistic relightable hand models require extensive identity-specific observations in different views, poses, and illuminations, and face challenges in generalizing to natural illuminations and novel identities. To bridge this gap, we present URHand, the first universal relightable hand model that generalizes across viewpoints, poses, illuminations, and identities. Our model allows few-shot personalization using images captured with a mobile phone, and is ready to be photorealistically rendered under novel illuminations. To simplify the personalization process while retaining photorealism, we build a powerful universal relightable prior based on neural relighting from multi-view images of hands captured in a light stage with hundreds of identities. The key challenge is scaling the cross-identity training while maintaining personalized fidelity and sharp details without compromising generalization under natural illuminations. To this end, we propose a spatially varying linear lighting model as the neural renderer that takes physics-inspired shading as input feature. By removing non-linear activations and bias, our specifically designed lighting model explicitly keeps the linearity of light transport. This enables single-stage training from light-stage data while generalizing to real-time rendering under arbitrary continuous illuminations across diverse identities. In addition, we introduce the joint learning of a physically based model and our neural relighting model, which further improves fidelity and generalization. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves superior performance over existing methods in terms of both quality and generalizability. We also demonstrate quick personalization of URHand from a short phone scan of an unseen identity.