Aligning Latent Spaces for 3D Hand Pose Estimation

Hand pose estimation from monocular RGB inputs is a highly challenging task. Many previous works for monocular settings only used RGB information for training despite the availability of corresponding data in other modalities such as depth maps. In this work, we propose to learn a joint latent representation that leverages other modalities as weak labels to improve RGB-based hand pose estimation. By design, our architecture is highly flexible in embedding various diverse modalities such as heat maps, depth maps and point clouds. In particular, we find that encoding and decoding the point cloud of the hand surface can improve the quality of the joint latent representations. Experiments show that with the aid of other modalities during training, our proposed method boosts the accuracy of RGB-based hand pose estimation systems and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art on two public benchmarks.