# XHand: Real-time Expressive Hand Avatar

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.21002 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21002/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving People from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04127/) (2022)
- [Modular Primitives for High-Performance Differentiable Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03277/) (2020)
- [Learning joint reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05767/) (2019)
- [Neural Point-Based Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08240/) (2019)
- [NeuS2: Fast Learning of Neural Implicit Surfaces for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05231/) (2022)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [Pose2Mesh: Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose and Mesh Recovery from a 2D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09047/) (2020)
- [InterHand2.6M: A Dataset and Baseline for 3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09309/) (2020)
- [I M Avatar: Implicit Morphable Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07471/) (2021)
- [SNARF: Differentiable Forward Skinning for Animating Non-Rigid Neural Implicit Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03953/) (2021)
- [Neural Head Avatars from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01554/) (2021)
- [BANMo: Building Animatable 3D Neural Models from Many Casual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12761/) (2021)
- [3D Hand Shape and Pose from Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03451/) (2019)
- [PointAvatar: Deformable Point-based Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08377/) (2022)
- [Reconstructing Hand-Object Interactions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09856/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Photometric Consistency over Time for Sparsely Supervised Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13449/) (2020)
- [Real-time Deep Dynamic Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01794/) (2021)
- [Reconstructing Personalized Semantic Facial NeRF Models From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06108/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Hand Mesh Recovery from a Monocular RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09305/) (2019)
- [HOPE-Net: A Graph-based Model for Hand-Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00060/) (2020)
- [MagicPony: Learning Articulated 3D Animals in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12497/) (2022)
- [LoopReg: Self-supervised Learning of Implicit Surface Correspondences, Pose and Shape for 3D Human Mesh Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12447/) (2020)
- [imGHUM: Implicit Generative Models of 3D Human Shape and Articulated Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10842/) (2021)
- [MobRecon: Mobile-Friendly Hand Mesh Reconstruction from Monocular Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02753/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [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)
- [HandSCS: Structural Coordinate Space for Animatable Hand Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14736/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hand avatars play a pivotal role in a wide array of digital interfaces, enhancing user immersion and facilitating natural interaction within virtual environments. While previous studies have focused on photo-realistic hand rendering, little attention has been paid to reconstruct the hand geometry with fine details, which is essential to rendering quality. In the realms of extended reality and gaming, on-the-fly rendering becomes imperative. To this end, we introduce an expressive hand avatar, named XHand, that is designed to comprehensively generate hand shape, appearance, and deformations in real-time. To obtain fine-grained hand meshes, we make use of three feature embedding modules to predict hand deformation displacements, albedo, and linear blending skinning weights, respectively. To achieve photo-realistic hand rendering on fine-grained meshes, our method employs a mesh-based neural renderer by leveraging mesh topological consistency and latent codes from embedding modules. During training, a part-aware Laplace smoothing strategy is proposed by incorporating the distinct levels of regularization to effectively maintain the necessary details and eliminate the undesired artifacts. The experimental evaluations on InterHand2.6M and DeepHandMesh datasets demonstrate the efficacy of XHand, which is able to recover high-fidelity geometry and texture for hand animations across diverse poses in real-time. To reproduce our results, we will make the full implementation publicly available at https://github.com/agnJason/XHand.