Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Hand pose tracking in 3D is an essential task for many virtual reality (VR) applications such as games and manipulating virtual objects with bare hands. CNN-based learning methods achieve the state-of-theart accuracy by directly regressing 3D pose from a single depth image. However, the 3D pose estimated by these methods is coarse and kinematically unstable due to independent learning of sparse joint positions. In this paper, we propose a novel structure-aware CNN-based algorithm which learns to automatically segment the hand from a raw depth image and estimate 3D hand pose jointly with new structural constraints. The constraints include fingers lengths, distances of joints along the kinematic chain and fingers inter-distances. Learning these constraints help to maintain a structural relation between the estimated joint keypoints. Also, we convert sparse representation of hand skeleton to dense by performing n-points interpolation between the pairs of parent and child joints. By comprehensive evaluation, we show the effectiveness of our approach and demonstrate competitive performance to the state-of-theart methods on the public NYU hand pose dataset.