I2UV-HandNet: Image-to-UV Prediction Network for Accurate and High-Fidelity 3D Hand Mesh Modeling

Reconstructing a high-precision and high-fidelity 3D human hand from a color image plays a central role in replicating a realistic virtual hand in human-computer interaction and virtual reality applications. Current methods are lacking in accuracy and fidelity due to various hand poses and severe occlusions. In this study, we propose an I2UV-HandNet model for accurate hand pose and shape estimation as well as 3D hand super-resolution reconstruction. Specifically, we present the first UV-based 3D hand shape representation. To recover a 3D hand mesh from an RGB image, we design an AffineNet to predict a UV position map from the input in an image-to-image translation fashion. To obtain a higher fidelity shape, we exploit an additional SRNet to transform the low-resolution UV map outputted by AffineNet into a high-resolution one. For the first time, we demonstrate the characterization capability of the UV-based hand shape representation. Our experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks.