# The Invisible EgoHand: 3D Hand Forecasting through EgoBody Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08654 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08654/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 75 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18259/) (2023)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [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)
- [H2O: Two Hands Manipulating Objects for First Person Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11181/) (2021)
- [First-Person Hand Action Benchmark with RGB-D Videos and 3D Hand Pose Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02463/) (2017)
- [Particle Video Revisited: Tracking Through Occlusions Using Point Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04153/) (2022)
- [Project Aria: A New Tool for Egocentric Multi-Modal AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13561/) (2023)
- [Anticipative Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02036/) (2021)
- [Long-term Human Motion Prediction with Scene Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03672/) (2020)
- [FrankMocap: A Monocular 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation System via Regression and Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06428/) (2021)
- [HoloAssist: an Egocentric Human Interaction Dataset for Interactive AI Assistants in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17024/) (2023)
- [Decoupling Human and Camera Motion from Videos in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12827/) (2023)
- [H+O: Unified Egocentric Recognition of 3D Hand-Object Poses and Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05349/) (2019)
- [EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Benchmark: VIdeo Segmentations and Object Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13064/) (2022)
- [EgoBody: Human Body Shape and Motion of Interacting People from Head-Mounted Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07642/) (2021)
- [HOPE-Net: A Graph-based Model for Hand-Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00060/) (2020)
- [Joint Hand Motion and Interaction Hotspots Prediction from Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01696/) (2022)
- [Affordance Diffusion: Synthesizing Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12538/) (2023)
- [What Would You Expect? Anticipating Egocentric Actions with Rolling-Unrolling LSTMs and Modality Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09035/) (2019)
- [Dynamics-Regulated Kinematic Policy for Egocentric Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05969/) (2021)
- [HandOccNet: Occlusion-Robust 3D Hand Mesh Estimation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14564/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Reconstructing 4D Spatial Intelligence: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21045/) (2025)
- [Flowing from Reasoning to Motion: Learning 3D Hand Trajectory Prediction from Egocentric Human Interaction Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16907/) (2025)
- [Uni-Hand: Universal Hand Motion Forecasting in Egocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12878/) (2025)
- [Seeing without Pixels: Perception from Camera Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21681/) (2025)
- [Hand Visibility Detector: Per-Keypoint Visibility Estimation for Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11574/) (2026)
- [ACE-Ego-Hand: Repurposing Video Diffusion Models for Occlusion-Robust Egocentric 3D Hand Motion Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20308/) (2026)
- [Bimanual 3D Hand Motion and Articulation Forecasting in Everyday Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06145/) (2025)
- [SFHand: Learning Embodied Manipulation by Streaming Egocentric 3D Hand Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18127/) (2025)
- [Prime and Reach: Synthesising Body Motion for Gaze-Primed Object Reach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16456/) (2025)
- [DeltaDorsal: Enhancing Hand Pose Estimation with Dorsal Features in Egocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15516/) (2026)
- [EggHand: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Egocentric Hand Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07642/) (2026)
- [Ego-Human Motion Prediction with 3D-Aware LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07001/) (2026)
- [Exo2EgoPose: Leveraging Exocentric Demonstrations for Vision-Language guided Egocentric 3D Hand Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15890/) (2026)
- [From Where to How: Continuous 4D Interaction Forecasting from Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08636/) (2026)
- [EventEgoHands++: Event-based Egocentric 3D Hand Mesh Reconstruction with Real Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17189/) (2026)
- [Ego-Exo4D Human Meshes Dataset: 4D Human Motion Reconstruction for Ego-Exo Captures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30187/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Forecasting hand motion and pose from an egocentric perspective is essential for understanding human intention. However, existing methods focus solely on predicting positions without considering articulation, and only when the hands are visible in the field of view. This limitation overlooks the fact that approximate hand positions can still be inferred even when they are outside the camera's view. In this paper, we propose a method to forecast the 3D trajectories and poses of both hands from an egocentric video, both in and out of the field of view. We propose a diffusion-based transformer architecture for Egocentric Hand Forecasting, EgoH4, which takes as input the observation sequence and camera poses, then predicts future 3D motion and poses for both hands of the camera wearer. We leverage full-body pose information, allowing other joints to provide constraints on hand motion. We denoise the hand and body joints along with a visibility predictor for hand joints and a 3D-to-2D reprojection loss that minimizes the error when hands are in-view. We evaluate EgoH4 on the Ego-Exo4D dataset, combining subsets with body and hand annotations. We train on 156K sequences and evaluate on 34K sequences, respectively. EgoH4 improves the performance by 3.4cm and 5.1cm over the baseline in terms of ADE for hand trajectory forecasting and MPJPE for hand pose forecasting. Project page: https://masashi-hatano.github.io/EgoH4/