# PhySIC: Physically Plausible 3D Human-Scene Interaction and Contact from a Single Image

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11649 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11649/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15506/) (2024)
- [MoGe: Unlocking Accurate Monocular Geometry Estimation for Open-Domain Images with Optimal Training Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19115/) (2024)
- [Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06963/) (2019)
- [A General and Adaptive Robust Loss Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.03077/) (2017)
- [WHAM: Reconstructing World-grounded Humans with Accurate 3D Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07531/) (2023)
- [Capturing and Inferring Dense Full-Body Human-Scene Contact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09553/) (2022)
- [Total3DUnderstanding: Joint Layout, Object Pose and Mesh Reconstruction for Indoor Scenes from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12212/) (2020)
- [EgoBody: Human Body Shape and Motion of Interacting People from Head-Mounted Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07642/) (2021)
- [Human POSEitioning System (HPS): 3D Human Pose Estimation and Self-localization in Large Scenes from Body-Mounted Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17265/) (2021)
- [WiLoR: End-to-end 3D Hand Localization and Reconstruction in-the-wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12259/) (2024)
- [TRAM: Global Trajectory and Motion of 3D Humans from in-the-wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17346/) (2024)
- [Putting Humans in a Scene: Learning Affordance in 3D Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05690/) (2019)
- [Holistic++ Scene Understanding: Single-view 3D Holistic Scene Parsing and Human Pose Estimation with Human-Object Interaction and Physical Commonsense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01507/) (2019)
- [Neural Localizer Fields for Continuous 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07532/) (2024)
- [Visibility Aware Human-Object Interaction Tracking from Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16479/) (2023)
- [ParaHome: Parameterizing Everyday Home Activities Towards 3D Generative Modeling of Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10232/) (2024)
- [Human-Aware Object Placement for Visual Environment Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03609/) (2022)
- [Holistic 3D Human and Scene Mesh Estimation from Single View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01591/) (2020)
- [OmniEraser: Remove Objects and Their Effects in Images with Paired Video-Frame Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07397/) (2025)
- [Human3R: Everyone Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06219/) (2025)
- [InterTrack: Tracking Human Object Interaction without Object Templates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13953/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [CARI4D: Category Agnostic 4D Reconstruction of Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11988/) (2025)
- [MeshMimic: Geometry-Aware Humanoid Motion Learning through 3D Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15733/) (2026)
- [SimuScene: Simulation-Ready Compositional 3D Scene Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03994/) (2026)
- [GeoRelight: Learning Joint Geometrical Relighting and Reconstruction with Flexible Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20715/) (2026)
- [MonoPhysics: Estimating Geometry, Appearance, and Physical Parameters from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30320/) (2026)
- [ACE-Data-0: Human-Centric Ambient Capture as Embodied Data Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28625/) (2026)
- [GRAFT: Geometric Refinement and Fitting Transformer for Human Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19624/) (2026)
- [MessyKitchens: Contact-rich object-level 3D scene reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16868/) (2026)
- [InHabit: Leveraging Image Foundation Models for Scalable 3D Human Placement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19673/) (2026)
- [UniCon3R: Unified Contact-aware 4D Human-Scene Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19923/) (2026)
- [Human Motion Estimation with Everyday Wearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21209/) (2025)
- [Hoi3DGen: Generating High-Quality Human-Object-Interactions in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12126/) (2026)
- [Pi-HOC: Pairwise 3D Human-Object Contact Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12923/) (2026)
- [A Benchmark for Spatially Grounded Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03105/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reconstructing metrically accurate humans and their surrounding scenes from a single image is crucial for virtual reality, robotics, and comprehensive 3D scene understanding. However, existing methods struggle with depth ambiguity, occlusions, and physically inconsistent contacts. To address these challenges, we introduce PhySIC, a framework for physically plausible Human-Scene Interaction and Contact reconstruction. PhySIC recovers metrically consistent SMPL-X human meshes, dense scene surfaces, and vertex-level contact maps within a shared coordinate frame from a single RGB image. Starting from coarse monocular depth and body estimates, PhySIC performs occlusion-aware inpainting, fuses visible depth with unscaled geometry for a robust metric scaffold, and synthesizes missing support surfaces like floors. A confidence-weighted optimization refines body pose, camera parameters, and global scale by jointly enforcing depth alignment, contact priors, interpenetration avoidance, and 2D reprojection consistency. Explicit occlusion masking safeguards invisible regions against implausible configurations. PhySIC is efficient, requiring only 9 seconds for joint human-scene optimization and under 27 seconds end-to-end. It naturally handles multiple humans, enabling reconstruction of diverse interactions. Empirically, PhySIC outperforms single-image baselines, reducing mean per-vertex scene error from 641 mm to 227 mm, halving PA-MPJPE to 42 mm, and improving contact F1 from 0.09 to 0.51. Qualitative results show realistic foot-floor interactions, natural seating, and plausible reconstructions of heavily occluded furniture. By converting a single image into a physically plausible 3D human-scene pair, PhySIC advances scalable 3D scene understanding. Our implementation is publicly available at https://yuxuan-xue.com/physic.