HOCOpt: Hand–Object Contact Optimization to Improve Pose Estimation in Physical Interactions

Reconstructing hand–object physical interaction through visual sensing is crucial to understanding human intentions and guaranteeing the safety of human–robot collaboration in industrial applications. Due to heavy occlusion and cluttered backgrounds, existing methods generate inaccurate pose estimation, leading to unrealistic physical interactions between hands and objects. In this article, we present a novel contact-driven pose optimization framework called hand–object contact optimization (HOCOpt) to achieve accurate hand–object pose estimation. The HOCOpt includes two parts: contact estimation and pose optimization. In the contact estimation, we propose a contact region estimation network (CREN) to predict the potential contact across the hand–object meshes with inaccurate poses. A novel contact entropy weight and an auxiliary network are introduced to the training process of CREN to accelerate the model learning and improve the prediction accuracy. For pose optimization, a two-stage hand–object pose optimization method is utilized to refine inaccurate poses by considering both contact distribution and contact stability. During optimization, an orientation-aware differentiable contact model is introduced to account for hand deformation and contact forces to achieve accurate contact modeling. Extensive experiments on ContactPose, HO3D, and DexYCB datasets show that our approach outperforms the existing baselines. Besides, experiments on physical interaction tasks for human–robot collaboration are conducted to demonstrate the practical significance of HOCOpt in industrial scenarios.