# HOISDF: Constraining 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation with Global Signed Distance Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17062 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17062/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders As Spatiotemporal Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09113/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [PVNet: Pixel-wise Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11788/) (2018)
- [INeRF: Inverting Neural Radiance Fields for Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05877/) (2020)
- [Learning joint reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05767/) (2019)
- [HOI4D: A 4D Egocentric Dataset for Category-Level Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01577/) (2022)
- [DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04631/) (2021)
- [StyleSDF: High-Resolution 3D-Consistent Image and Geometry Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11427/) (2021)
- [FreiHAND: A Dataset for Markerless Capture of Hand Pose and Shape from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04349/) (2019)
- [Neural Unsigned Distance Fields for Implicit Function Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13938/) (2020)
- [Learning to Estimate 3D Hand Pose from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01389/) (2017)
- [PVN3D: A Deep Point-wise 3D Keypoints Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04231/) (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)
- [FrankMocap: A Monocular 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation System via Regression and Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06428/) (2021)
- [Neural-Pull: Learning Signed Distance Functions from Point Clouds by Learning to Pull Space onto Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13495/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised 3D Hand-Object Poses Estimation with Interactions in Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05266/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Photometric Consistency over Time for Sparsely Supervised Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13449/) (2020)
- [Keypoint Transformer: Solving Joint Identification in Challenging Hands and Object Interactions for Accurate 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14639/) (2021)
- [HandOccNet: Occlusion-Robust 3D Hand Mesh Estimation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14564/) (2022)
- [CHORE: Contact, Human and Object REconstruction from a single RGB image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02445/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Hamba: Single-view 3D Hand Reconstruction with Graph-guided Bi-Scanning Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09646/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07801/) (2024)
- [InterTrack: Tracking Human Object Interaction without Object Templates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13953/) (2024)
- [HORT: Monocular Hand-held Objects Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21313/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-based 3D Hand Motion Recovery with Intuitive Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01835/) (2025)
- [Towards Dynamic 3D Reconstruction of Hand-Instrument Interaction in Ophthalmic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17677/) (2025)
- [Occlusion-Aware 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation with Masked AutoEncoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10816/) (2025)
- [Estimating 2D Keypoints of Surgical Tools Using Vision-Language Models with Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20830/) (2025)
- [Interaction-Aware 4D Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14540/) (2025)
- [GenHOI: Generalized Hand-Object Pose Estimation with Occlusion Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19013/) (2026)
- [Hand-Object Interaction in the Age of Large Foundation Models:Reconstruction, Generation, and Embodied Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28394/) (2026)
- [HandS3C: 3D Hand Mesh Reconstruction with State Space Spatial Channel Attention from RGB images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01066/) (2024)
- [VPHO: Joint Visual-Physical Cue Learning and Aggregation for Hand-Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12030/) (2025)
- [LEXIS: LatEnt ProXimal Interaction Signatures for 3D HOI from an Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20800/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human hands are highly articulated and versatile at handling objects. Jointly estimating the 3D poses of a hand and the object it manipulates from a monocular camera is challenging due to frequent occlusions. Thus, existing methods often rely on intermediate 3D shape representations to increase performance. These representations are typically explicit, such as 3D point clouds or meshes, and thus provide information in the direct surroundings of the intermediate hand pose estimate. To address this, we introduce HOISDF, a Signed Distance Field (SDF) guided hand-object pose estimation network, which jointly exploits hand and object SDFs to provide a global, implicit representation over the complete reconstruction volume. Specifically, the role of the SDFs is threefold: equip the visual encoder with implicit shape information, help to encode hand-object interactions, and guide the hand and object pose regression via SDF-based sampling and by augmenting the feature representations. We show that HOISDF achieves state-of-the-art results on hand-object pose estimation benchmarks (DexYCB and HO3Dv2). Code is available at https://github.com/amathislab/HOISDF