# Pre-Training for 3D Hand Pose Estimation with Contrastive Learning on Large-Scale Hand Images in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09714 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09714/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [Deep Metric Learning via Lifted Structured Feature Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06452/) (2015)
- [DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04631/) (2021)
- [Assembly101: A Large-Scale Multi-View Video Dataset for Understanding Procedural Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14712/) (2022)
- [Understanding Human Hands in Contact at Internet Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06669/) (2020)
- [FreiHAND: A Dataset for Markerless Capture of Hand Pose and Shape from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04349/) (2019)
- [Patch-NetVLAD: Multi-Scale Fusion of Locally-Global Descriptors for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01486/) (2021)
- [Self-paced Contrastive Learning with Hybrid Memory for Domain Adaptive Object Re-ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02713/) (2020)
- [DexMV: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05877/) (2021)
- [3D Hand Shape and Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00812/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Visual Geo-localization for Large-Scale Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02287/) (2022)
- [Semi-Supervised 3D Hand-Object Poses Estimation with Interactions in Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05266/) (2021)
- [Self-supervising Fine-grained Region Similarities for Large-scale Image Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03926/) (2020)
- [Monocular Real-time Hand Shape and Motion Capture using Multi-modal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09572/) (2020)
- [HandOccNet: Occlusion-Robust 3D Hand Mesh Estimation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14564/) (2022)
- [ICE: Inter-instance Contrastive Encoding for Unsupervised Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16364/) (2021)
- [AssemblyHands: Towards Egocentric Activity Understanding via 3D Hand Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12301/) (2023)
- [Joint Generative and Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09071/) (2020)
- [UmeTrack: Unified multi-view end-to-end hand tracking for VR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00099/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Positive Mining for Unsupervised 3D Action Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03497/) (2022)

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

- [Learning Transformation-Isomorphic Latent Space for Accurate Hand Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12535/) (2025)
- [DF-Mamba: Deformable State Space Modeling for 3D Hand Pose Estimation in Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02727/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a contrastive learning framework based on in-the-wild hand images tailored for pre-training 3D hand pose estimators, dubbed HandCLR. Pre-training on large-scale images achieves promising results in various tasks, but prior 3D hand pose pre-training methods have not fully utilized the potential of diverse hand images accessible from in-the-wild videos. To facilitate scalable pre-training, we first prepare an extensive pool of hand images from in-the-wild videos and design our method with contrastive learning. Specifically, we collected over 2.0M hand images from recent human-centric videos, such as 100DOH and Ego4D. To extract discriminative information from these images, we focus on the similarity of hands; pairs of similar hand poses originating from different samples, and propose a novel contrastive learning method that embeds similar hand pairs closer in the latent space. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional contrastive learning approaches that produce positive pairs sorely from a single image with data augmentation. We achieve significant improvements over the state-of-the-art method in various datasets, with gains of 15% on FreiHand, 10% on DexYCB, and 4% on AssemblyHands.