# Hand-Shadow Poser

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07012 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07012/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 113 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [Meta-Learning with Implicit Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04630/) (2019)
- [Instruct-NeRF2NeRF: Editing 3D Scenes with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12789/) (2023)
- [DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04631/) (2021)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [I2L-MeshNet: Image-to-Lixel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Mesh Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03713/) (2020)
- [FreiHAND: A Dataset for Markerless Capture of Hand Pose and Shape from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04349/) (2019)
- [InterHand2.6M: A Dataset and Baseline for 3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09309/) (2020)
- [Learning to Estimate 3D Hand Pose from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01389/) (2017)
- [Hand Keypoint Detection in Single Images using Multiview Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07809/) (2017)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [Whole-Body Human Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11858/) (2020)
- [Monocular Total Capture: Posing Face, Body, and Hands in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01598/) (2018)
- [Hand-Object Contact Consistency Reasoning for Human Grasps Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03304/) (2021)
- [CPF: Learning a Contact Potential Field to Model the Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00924/) (2020)
- [End-to-end Hand Mesh Recovery from a Monocular RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09305/) (2019)
- [Capturing Hands in Action using Discriminative Salient Points and Physics Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02178/) (2015)
- [Hand Pose Estimation via Latent 2.5D Heatmap Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09534/) (2018)
- [Monocular Real-time Hand Shape and Motion Capture using Multi-modal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09572/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [ShadowDraw: From Any Object to Shadow-Drawing Compositional Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05110/) (2025)
- [CNS-Edit++: Category-Agnostic 3D Editing with Coupled Neural Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16577/) (2026)
- [Robot Learning to Communicate through Projected Visual Abstractions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22434/) (2026)
- [Differentiable Voxelization of Surface Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15934/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hand shadow art is a captivating art form, creatively using hand shadows to reproduce expressive shapes on the wall. In this work, we study an inverse problem: given a target shape, find the poses of left and right hands that together best produce a shadow resembling the input. This problem is nontrivial, since the design space of 3D hand poses is huge while being restrictive due to anatomical constraints. Also, we need to attend to the input's shape and crucial features, though the input is colorless and textureless. To meet these challenges, we design Hand-Shadow Poser, a three-stage pipeline, to decouple the anatomical constraints (by hand) and semantic constraints (by shadow shape): (i) a generative hand assignment module to explore diverse but reasonable left/right-hand shape hypotheses; (ii) a generalized hand-shadow alignment module to infer coarse hand poses with a similarity-driven strategy for selecting hypotheses; and (iii) a shadow-feature-aware refinement module to optimize the hand poses for physical plausibility and shadow feature preservation. Further, we design our pipeline to be trainable on generic public hand data, thus avoiding the need for any specialized training dataset. For method validation, we build a benchmark of 210 diverse shadow shapes of varying complexity and a comprehensive set of metrics, including a novel DINOv2-based evaluation metric. Through extensive comparisons with multiple baselines and user studies, our approach is demonstrated to effectively generate bimanual hand poses for a large variety of hand shapes for over 85% of the benchmark cases.