Text-to-image generative models can generate high-quality humans, but realism is lost when generating hands. Common artifacts include irregular hand poses, shapes, incorrect numbers of fingers, and physically implausible finger orientations. To generate images with realistic hands, we propose a novel diffusion-based architecture called HanDiffuser that achieves realism by injecting hand embeddings in the generative process. HanDiffuser consists of two components: a Text-to-Hand-Params diffusion model to generate SMPL-Body and MANO-Hand parameters from input text prompts, and a Text-Guided Hand-Params-to-Image diffusion model to synthesize images by conditioning on the prompts and hand parameters generated by the previous component. We incorporate multiple aspects of hand representation, including 3D shapes and joint-level finger positions, orientations and articulations, for robust learning and reliable performance during inference. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments and perform user studies to demonstrate the efficacy of our method in generating images with high-quality hands. Project page: https://supreethn.github.io/research/handiffuser/index.html

We address the challenging task of identifying, segmenting, and tracking hand-held objects, which is crucial for applications such as human action segmentation and per-formance evaluation. This task is particularly challenging due to heavy occlusion, rapid motion, and the transitory nature of objects being hand-held, where an object may be held, released, and subsequently picked up again. To tackle these challenges, we have developed a novel transformer-based architecture called HOIST-Former. HOIST-Former is adept at spatially and temporally segmenting hands and objects by iteratively pooling features from each other, ensuring that the processes of identification, segmentation, and tracking of hand-held objects depend on the hands' positions and their contextual appearance. We further refine HOIST-Former with a contact loss that focuses on areas where hands are in contact with objects. Moreover, we also contribute an in-the-wild video dataset called HOIST, which comprises 4,125 videos complete with bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and tracking IDs for hand-held objects. Through experiments on the HOIST dataset and two ad-ditional public datasets, we demonstrate the efficacy of HOIST-Former in segmenting and tracking hand-held objects. Project page: https://supreethn.github.io/research/hoistformer/index.html

We propose HandLer, a novel convolutional architecture that can jointly detect and track hands online in unconstrained videos. HandLer is based on Cascade-RCNN with additional three novel stages. The first stage is Forward Propagation, where the features from frame t −1 are propagated to frame t based on previously detected hands and their estimated motion. The second stage is the Detection and Backward Regression, which uses outputs from the forward propagation to detect hands for frame t and their relative offset in frame t −1. The third stage uses an off-the-shelf human pose method to link any fragmented hand tracklets. We train the forward propagation and backward regression and detection stages end-to-end together with the other Cascade-RCNN components. To train and evaluate HandLer, we also contribute YouTube-Hand, the first challenging large-scale dataset of unconstrained videos annotated with hand locations and their trajectories. Experiments on this dataset and other benchmarks show that HandLer outperforms the existing state-of-the-art tracking algorithms by a large margin. Code and data are available at https://vision.cs.stonybrook.edu/~mingzhen/handler/.

We study a new problem of detecting hands and finding the location of the corresponding person for each detected hand. This task is helpful for many downstream tasks such as hand tracking and hand contact estimation. Associating hands with people is challenging in unconstrained conditions since multiple people can be present in the scene with varying overlaps and occlusions. We propose a novel end-to-end trainable convolutional network that can Jointly detect hands and the body location for the corresponding person. Our method first detects a set of hands and bodies and uses a novel Hand-Body Association Network to predict association scores between them. We use these association scores to find the body location for each detected hand. We also introduce a new challenging dataset called BodyHands containing uncon-strained images with hand and their corresponding body locations annotations. We conduct extensive experiments on BodyHands and another public dataset to show the effectiveness of our method. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of hand-body association in two critical applications: hand tracking and hand contact estimation. Our experiments show that hand tracking and hand contact estimation methods can be improved significantly by reasoning about the hand-body association. Code and data can be found at http://vision.cs.stonybrook.edu/~supreeth/BodyHands/.

We investigate a new problem of detecting hands and recognizing their physical contact state in unconstrained conditions. This is a challenging inference task given the need to reason beyond the local appearance of hands. The lack of training annotations indicating which object or parts of an object the hand is in contact with further complicates the task. We propose a novel convolutional network based on Mask-RCNN that can jointly learn to localize hands and predict their physical contact to address this problem. The network uses outputs from another object detector to obtain locations of objects present in the scene. It uses these outputs and hand locations to recognize the hand's contact state using two attention mechanisms. The first attention mechanism is based on the hand and a region's affinity, enclosing the hand and the object, and densely pools features from this region to the hand region. The second attention module adaptively selects salient features from this plausible region of contact. To develop and evaluate our method's performance, we introduce a large-scale dataset called ContactHands, containing unconstrained images annotated with hand locations and contact states. The proposed network, including the parameters of attention modules, is end-to-end trainable. This network achieves approximately 7% relative improvement over a baseline network that was built on the vanilla Mask-RCNN architecture and trained for recognizing hand contact states.

We present Hand-CNN, a novel convolutional network architecture for detecting hand masks and predicting hand orientations in unconstrained images. Hand-CNN extends MaskRCNN with a novel attention mechanism to incorporate contextual cues in the detection process. This attention mechanism can be implemented as an efficient network module that captures non-local dependencies between features. This network module can be inserted at different stages of an object detection network, and the entire detector can be trained end-to-end. We also introduce large-scale annotated hand datasets containing hands in unconstrained images for training and evaluation. We show that Hand-CNN outperforms existing methods on the newly collected datasets and the publicly available PASCAL VOC human layout dataset. Data and code: https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~cvl/projects/hand_det_attention/.