DenseHap: Dense Hand Haptic Estimation from Monocular Images

As dexterous robotic manipulation advances, scalable annotations of human hand-object interactions are becoming increasingly important. Furthermore, previous hand contact estimation methods suffered from issues such as dorsal-side misclassifications and insufficient precision, while lacking a unified framework for integrating multiple hand to environment interaction modalities, including distance fields, contact thresholds, and pressure. To address that, we present DenseHap, a unified end-to-end approach to estimate hand distance field recognition, comprehensive hand contact detection, hand pressure analysis, and hand reconstruction from a single monocular image. By incorporating three distinctly defined heads, along with a pretrained 3D reconstructed skeleton and an enhanced dataset, DenseHap outperforms previous state of the art models on four evaluation datasets, improving the F1 score by 8.5 percentage points (a 16% relative improvement) on untrained datasets and by 3 percentage points (5% relative improvement) on in-distribution datasets. Furthermore, DenseHap has effectively improved short-range hand estimate and pressure evaluation. Code and models will be publicly available upon the paper's acceptance.