ArXiv

HOPE: Hand-Object Pressure Estimation from Monocular Videos

Authors
Subin Jeon, Byungjun Kim, Hanbyul Joo
Categories
cs.CV
arXiv
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06192v1
PDF
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.06192v1

Brief

HOPE formulates pressure estimation as a hand-centric video prediction task, outputting per-vertex normal pressure and contact on a hand mesh from monocular video. It combines a vertex-anchored video transformer with a contact-gated pressure head and a unified hand-vertex label space that assimilates glove, planar, and distance-based annotations. Validated on OpenTouch and PressureVisionDB, HOPE generalizes from gloved supervision to bare-hand, egocentric, and in-the-wild footage.

Why it matters

HOPE (Subin Jeon, Byungjun Kim, Hanbyul Joo; arXiv 2026-08-06) predicts temporally evolving per-vertex normal pressure and binary contact on a hand mesh from monocular video using a vertex-anchored video transformer with persistent vertex tokens and a contact-gated pressure head that forces pressure to zero when no contact is predicted.

Key details

  • The method lifts heterogeneous supervision—tactile-glove metric pressure, planar-sensor pressure, and distance-based contact labels—into a shared hand-vertex space so bare-hand contact-only data can regularize pressure learning where metric labels are unavailable.
  • HOPE is evaluated on OpenTouch, PressureVisionDB, and standard hand-object contact benchmarks; trained mainly with gloved-hand metric supervision, it generalizes to bare-hand egocentric and in-the-wild videos and produces joint contact+pressure outputs beyond contact-only or planar-pressure baselines (arXiv:2608.06192v1).
Source evidence

Abstract

Estimating physical pressure from vision is essential for understanding contact-rich hand-object interaction. However, prior vision-based pressure estimation methods are largely limited to planar surfaces and single image input, making them difficult to apply to dynamic hand-object interaction with diverse objects. We instead formulate pressure estimation as a hand-centric video prediction problem with monocular video as input. This formulation predicts temporally evolving per-vertex normal pressure and contact directly on the hand mesh, yielding a unified output space independent of object shape and sensor layout. Building on this formulation, we propose \textbf{HOPE}, a framework with two key components. First, we lift tactile-glove pressure, planar-sensor pressure, and distance-based hand-object contact annotations into a shared hand vertex space, allowing bare-hand contact data to regularize pressure learning where metric labels are unavailable. Second, we introduce a vertex-anchored video transformer that treats each vertex as a persistent token, aggregates visual features and hand pose over time, and uses a contact-gated pressure head to enforce that pressure vanishes without contact. Experiments on OpenTouch, PressureVisionDB, and hand-object contact benchmarks validate HOPE across object-pressure, surface-pressure, and contact-supervised HOI settings. Despite using metric pressure supervision primarily from gloved-hand videos, HOPE generalizes to bare-hand egocentric and in-the-wild videos, producing joint contact and pressure predictions beyond the scope of contact-only or planar-pressure baselines.

Comment: project page is at: https://subin6.github.io/page-hope