# Shoe Style-Invariant and Ground-Aware Learning for Dense Foot Contact Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22184 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22184/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [Learning 3D Human Dynamics from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01601/) (2018)
- [Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06963/) (2019)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Populating 3D Scenes by Learning Human-Scene Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11581/) (2020)
- [Physical Inertial Poser (PIP): Physics-aware Real-time Human Motion Tracking from Sparse Inertial Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08528/) (2022)
- [Robust and Generalizable Visual Representation Learning via Random Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13003/) (2020)
- [EgoBody: Human Body Shape and Motion of Interacting People from Head-Mounted Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07642/) (2021)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation via Intuitive Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18246/) (2023)
- [InterCap: Joint Markerless 3D Tracking of Humans and Objects in Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12354/) (2022)
- [Hi4D: 4D Instance Segmentation of Close Human Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15380/) (2023)
- [Batch-Instance Normalization for Adaptively Style-Invariant Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07925/) (2018)
- [Monocular 3D Object Detection: An Extrinsic Parameter Free Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15796/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Learning Human-Object Interaction for 3D Human Pose Estimation from LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16343/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Foot contact plays a critical role in human interaction with the world, and thus exploring foot contact can advance our understanding of human movement and physical interaction. Despite its importance, existing methods often approximate foot contact using a zero-velocity constraint and focus on joint-level contact, failing to capture the detailed interaction between the foot and the world. Dense estimation of foot contact is crucial for accurately modeling this interaction, yet predicting dense foot contact from a single RGB image remains largely underexplored. There are two main challenges for learning dense foot contact estimation. First, shoes exhibit highly diverse appearances, making it difficult for models to generalize across different styles. Second, ground often has a monotonous appearance, making it difficult to extract informative features. To tackle these issues, we present a FEet COntact estimation (FECO) framework that learns dense foot contact with shoe style-invariant and ground-aware learning. To overcome the challenge of shoe appearance diversity, our approach incorporates shoe style adversarial training that enforces shoe style-invariant features for contact estimation. To effectively utilize ground information, we introduce a ground feature extractor that captures ground properties based on spatial context. As a result, our proposed method achieves robust foot contact estimation regardless of shoe appearance and effectively leverages ground information. The codes are available at https://github.com/dqj5182/FECO_RELEASE.