HMR-Adapter: A Lightweight Adapter with Dual-Path Cross Augmentation for Expressive Human Mesh Recovery

Expressive Human Mesh Recovery (HMR) involves reconstructing the 3D human body, including hands and face, from RGB images. It is difficult because humans are highly deformable, and hands are small and frequently occluded. Recent approaches have attempted to mitigate these issues using large datasets and models, but these solutions remain imperfect. Specifically, whole-body estimation models often inaccurately estimate hand poses, while hand expert models struggle with severe occlusions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a dual-path cross augmentation framework with a novel adaptation approach called HMR-Adapter that enhances existing large HMR models. HMR-Adapter significantly improves expressive HMR performance by injecting additional guidance from other body parts. This approach refines hand pose predictions by incorporating body pose information and uses additional hand features to enhance body pose estimation in whole-body models. Remarkably, an HMR-Adapter with about 30M parameters significantly improves expressive HMR results by combining the adapted large whole-body and hand expert models. We show extensive experiments and analysis to demonstrate the efficacy of our method.