Accurate 3D hand pose estimation network utilizing joints information

In this paper, a method is proposed to improve the accuracy of 3D hand pose estimation. The existing methods make poor use of the depth information of hand joints and have difficulties of estimating the 3D coordinates accurately. To solve this problem, a method that utilizing the information between adjacent joints of each finger is proposed to estimate the depth coordinates of joints. In order to make full use of 2D information for depth estimation, this paper divides hand pose estimation into two sub-tasks (2D hand joints estimation and depth estimation). In depth estimation, a multi-stage network is proposed. We first estimate the depth of a part of hand joints, and then with the help of it and 2D information, the depth coordinates of adjacent joints can be well estimated. The method proposed in this paper has been proved to be effective on three public hand pose datasets through Self-comparisons. Compared with the methods that based on 2D CNN, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on ICVL and NYU datasets, and also has a good result on MSRA dataset.