Hand avatars play a pivotal role in a wide array of digital interfaces. Fine-detailed and realistic hand representations enhance user immersion and facilitating natural interaction within virtual environments. While previous studies have focused on photo-realistic hand rendering, little attention has been paid to reconstruct the hand geometry with fine details, which is essential to rendering quality. In the realms of extended reality and gaming, on-the-fly rendering becomes imperative. To this end, we introduce an expressive hand avatar, named XHand, that is designed to comprehensively generate hand shape, appearance, and deformations in real-time. To obtain fine-grained hand meshes, we make use of three feature embedding modules to predict hand deformation displacements, albedo, and linear blending skinning weights, respectively. To achieve photo-realistic hand rendering on fine-grained meshes, our method employs a mesh-based neural renderer by leveraging mesh topological consistency and latent codes from embedding modules. During training, a part-aware Laplace smoothing strategy is proposed by incorporating the distinct levels of regularization to effectively maintain the necessary details and eliminate the undesired artifacts. The experimental evaluations on InterHand2.6M and DeepHandMesh datasets demonstrate the efficacy of XHand, which is able to recover high-fidelity geometry and texture for hand animations across diverse poses in real-time. To reproduce our results, we will make the full implementation publicly available at https://github.com/agnJason/XHand.

Recently, artificial intelligence techniques for education have been received increasing attentions, while it still remains an open problem to design the effective music instrument instructing systems. Although key presses can be directly derived from sheet music, the transitional movements among key presses require more extensive guidance in piano performance. In this work, we construct a piano-hand motion generation benchmark to guide hand movements and fingerings for piano playing. To this end, we collect an annotated dataset, PianoMotion10M, consisting of 116 hours of piano playing videos from a bird's-eye view with 10 million annotated hand poses. We also introduce a powerful baseline model that generates hand motions from piano audios through a position predictor and a position-guided gesture generator. Furthermore, a series of evaluation metrics are designed to assess the performance of the baseline model, including motion similarity, smoothness, positional accuracy of left and right hands, and overall fidelity of movement distribution. Despite that piano key presses with respect to music scores or audios are already accessible, PianoMotion10M aims to provide guidance on piano fingering for instruction purposes. The source code and dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/agnJason/PianoMotion10M.

We propose an approach for optimizing high-quality clothed human body shapes in minutes, using multi-view posed images. While traditional neural rendering methods struggle to disentangle geometry and appearance using only rendering loss, and are computationally intensive, our method uses a mesh-based patch warping technique to ensure multi-view photometric consistency, and sphere harmonics (SH) illumination to refine geometric details efficiently. We employ oriented point clouds’ shape representation and SH shading, which significantly reduces optimization and rendering times compared to implicit methods. Our approach has demonstrated promising results on both synthetic and real-world datasets, making it an effective solution for rapidly generating high-quality human body shapes. Project page with source code is https://l1346792580123.github.io/nccsfs/.

Reconstructing high-fidelity hand models with intricate textures plays a crucial role in enhancing human-object interaction and advancing real-world applications. Despite the state-of-the-art methods excelling in texture generation and image rendering, they often face challenges in accurately capturing geometric details. Learning-based approaches usually offer better robustness and faster inference, which tend to produce smoother results and require substantial amounts of training data. To address these issues, we present a novel fine-grained multi-view hand mesh reconstruction method that leverages inverse rendering to restore hand poses and intricate details. Firstly, our approach predicts a parametric hand mesh model through Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) based method from multi-view images. We further introduce a novel Hand Albedo and Mesh (HAM) optimization module to refine both the hand mesh and textures, which is capable of preserving the mesh topology. In addition, we suggest an effective mesh-based neural rendering scheme to simultaneously generate photo-realistic image and optimize mesh geometry by fusing the pre-trained rendering network with vertex features. We conduct the comprehensive experiments on InterHand2.6M, DeepHandMesh and dataset collected by ourself, whose promising results show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both reconstruction accuracy and rendering quality. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/agnJason/FMHR.