Weakly-supervised Domain Adaptation via GAN and Mesh Model for Estimating 3D Hand Poses Interacting Objects

Despite recent successes in hand pose estimation, there yet remain challenges on RGB-based 3D hand pose estimation (HPE) under hand-object interaction (HOI) scenarios where severe occlusions and cluttered backgrounds exhibit. Recent RGB HOI benchmarks have been collected either in real or synthetic domain, however, the size of datasets is far from enough to deal with diverse objects combined with hand poses, and 3D pose annotations of real samples are lacking, especially for occluded cases. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end trainable pipeline that adapts the hand-object domain to the single hand-only domain, while learning for HPE. The domain adaption occurs in image space via 2D pixel-level guidance by Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and 3D mesh guidance by mesh renderer (MR). Via the domain adaption in image space, not only 3D HPE accuracy is improved, but also HOI input images are translated to segmented and de-occluded hand-only images. The proposed method takes advantages of both the guidances: GAN accurately aligns hands, while MR effectively fills in occluded pixels. The experiments using Dexter-Object, Ego-Dexter and HO3D datasets show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts trained by hand-only data and is comparable to those supervised by HOI data. Note our method is trained primarily by hand-only images with pose labels, and HOI images without pose labels.