# GHOST: Fast Category-agnostic Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction from RGB Videos using Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18912 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18912/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05663/) (2023)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [Learning joint reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05767/) (2019)
- [ARCTIC: A Dataset for Dexterous Bimanual Hand-Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13662/) (2022)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02069/) (2023)
- [Visual Geometry Grounded Deep Structure From Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04563/) (2023)
- [Segment and Track Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06558/) (2023)
- [OpenShape: Scaling Up 3D Shape Representation Towards Open-World Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10764/) (2023)
- [RTMPose: Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Estimation based on MMPose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07399/) (2023)
- [SplattingAvatar: Realistic Real-Time Human Avatars with Mesh-Embedded Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05087/) (2024)
- [HUGS: Human Gaussian Splats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17910/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Photometric Consistency over Time for Sparsely Supervised Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13449/) (2020)
- [OakInk: A Large-scale Knowledge Repository for Understanding Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15709/) (2022)
- [WiLoR: End-to-end 3D Hand Localization and Reconstruction in-the-wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12259/) (2024)
- [Human Gaussian Splatting: Real-time Rendering of Animatable Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17113/) (2023)
- [ASH: Animatable Gaussian Splats for Efficient and Photoreal Human Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05941/) (2023)
- [HandOccNet: Occlusion-Robust 3D Hand Mesh Estimation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14564/) (2022)
- [What's in your hands? 3D Reconstruction of Generic Objects in Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07153/) (2022)
- [OAKINK2: A Dataset of Bimanual Hands-Object Manipulation in Complex Task Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19417/) (2024)
- [HOLD: Category-agnostic 3D Reconstruction of Interacting Hands and Objects from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18448/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Hand-Object Interaction in the Age of Large Foundation Models:Reconstruction, Generation, and Embodied Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28394/) (2026)
- [DynamicHOI: Coupled Dynamics for Physics-aware HOI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36454/) (2026)
- [4D-HOF: Hand-Object Flow Matching for Feed-Forward 4D Interaction Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08782/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding realistic hand-object interactions from monocular RGB videos is essential for AR/VR, robotics, and embodied AI. Existing methods rely on category-specific templates or heavy computation, yet still produce physically inconsistent hand-object alignment in 3D. We introduce GHOST (Gaussian Hand-Object Splatting), a fast, category-agnostic framework for reconstructing dynamic hand-object interactions using 2D Gaussian Splatting. GHOST represents both hands and objects as dense, view-consistent Gaussian discs and introduces three key innovations: (1) a geometric-prior retrieval and consistency loss that completes occluded object regions, (2) a grasp-aware alignment that refines hand translations and object scale to ensure realistic contact, and (3) a hand-aware background loss that prevents penalizing hand-occluded object regions. GHOST achieves complete, physically consistent, and animatable reconstructions from a single RGB video while running an order of magnitude faster than prior category-agnostic methods. Extensive experiments on ARCTIC, HO3D, and in-the-wild datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy in 3D reconstruction and 2D rendering quality, establishing GHOST as an efficient and robust solution for realistic hand-object interaction modeling. Code is available at https://github.com/ATAboukhadra/GHOST.