# PICO: Reconstructing 3D People In Contact with Objects

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17695 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17695/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 80 of its 96 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 80)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11328/) (2023)
- [Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10440/) (2022)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05663/) (2023)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Pixel2Mesh: Generating 3D Mesh Models from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01654/) (2018)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [3D-R2N2: A Unified Approach for Single and Multi-view 3D Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00449/) (2016)
- [PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00452/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [GRAB: A Dataset of Whole-Body Human Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11200/) (2020)
- [Magic123: One Image to High-Quality 3D Object Generation Using Both 2D and 3D Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17843/) (2023)
- [Learning joint reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05767/) (2019)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [Learning 3D Human Dynamics from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01601/) (2018)
- [ARCTIC: A Dataset for Dexterous Bimanual Hand-Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13662/) (2022)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06963/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Mesh Regression for Single-Image Human Shape Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03244/) (2019)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [CARI4D: Category Agnostic 4D Reconstruction of Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11988/) (2025)
- [MMHOI: Modeling Complex 3D Multi-Human Multi-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07828/) (2025)
- [Efficient and Scalable Monocular Human-Object Interaction Motion Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00960/) (2025)
- [Decoupled Generative Modeling for Human-Object Interaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19049/) (2025)
- [Towards in-the-wild Egocentric 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30598/) (2026)
- [Surface Keypoint Representation for Multi-Object and Articulated Human-Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03158/) (2026)
- [H2OFlow: Grounding Human-Object Affordances with 3D Generative Models and Dense Diffused Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21769/) (2025)
- [DecoDINO: 3D Human-Scene Contact Prediction with Semantic Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23203/) (2025)
- [TeHOR: Text-Guided 3D Human and Object Reconstruction with Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19679/) (2026)
- [End-to-End Spatial-Temporal Transformer for Real-time 4D HOI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14435/) (2026)
- [GraphiContact: Pose-aware Human-Scene Robust Contact Perception for Interactive Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20310/) (2026)
- [UniCon3R: Unified Contact-aware 4D Human-Scene Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19923/) (2026)
- [InterPhys: Physics-aware Human Motion Synthesis in a Dynamic Scene](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01036/) (2026)
- [Pi-HOC: Pairwise 3D Human-Object Contact Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12923/) (2026)
- [LEXIS: LatEnt ProXimal Interaction Signatures for 3D HOI from an Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20800/) (2026)
- [Real2Sim in HOI: Toward Physically Plausible HOI Reconstruction from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14462/) (2026)
- [RHINO: Reconstructing Human Interactions with Novel Objects from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17014/) (2026)
- [Recovering Physically Plausible Human-Object Interactions from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05359/) (2026)
- [EgoPHI: Estimating 3D Hand-Object Contact and Force from Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13014/) (2026)
- [Reconstructing Humans and Objects in Interaction using Large Reconstruction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27407/) (2026)
- [GraspHOI: Full-Body 3D Human-Object Reconstruction with Finger-Level Grasps from a Single In-the-Wild Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28386/) (2026)
- [Prosthesis-Aware 3D Human Pose Estimation: A Dataset and Benchmark for RSP Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18406/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recovering 3D Human-Object Interaction (HOI) from single color images is challenging due to depth ambiguities, occlusions, and the huge variation in object shape and appearance. Thus, past work requires controlled settings such as known object shapes and contacts, and tackles only limited object classes. Instead, we need methods that generalize to natural images and novel object classes. We tackle this in two main ways: (1) We collect PICO-db, a new dataset of natural images uniquely paired with dense 3D contact on both body and object meshes. To this end, we use images from the recent DAMON dataset that are paired with contacts, but these contacts are only annotated on a canonical 3D body. In contrast, we seek contact labels on both the body and the object. To infer these given an image, we retrieve an appropriate 3D object mesh from a database by leveraging vision foundation models. Then, we project DAMON's body contact patches onto the object via a novel method needing only 2 clicks per patch. This minimal human input establishes rich contact correspondences between bodies and objects. (2) We exploit our new dataset of contact correspondences in a novel render-and-compare fitting method, called PICO-fit, to recover 3D body and object meshes in interaction. PICO-fit infers contact for the SMPL-X body, retrieves a likely 3D object mesh and contact from PICO-db for that object, and uses the contact to iteratively fit the 3D body and object meshes to image evidence via optimization. Uniquely, PICO-fit works well for many object categories that no existing method can tackle. This is crucial to enable HOI understanding to scale in the wild. Our data and code are available at https://pico.is.tue.mpg.de.