Data-driven animation of hand-object interactions

Animating hand-object interactions is a frequent task in applications such as the production of 3d movies. Unfortunately this task is difficult due to the hand's many degrees of freedom and the constraints on the hand motion imposed by the geometry of the object. However, the causality between the object state and the hand's pose can be exploited in order to simplify the animation process. In this paper, we present a method that takes an animation of an object as input and automatically generates the corresponding hand motion. This approach is based on the simple observation that objects are easier to animate than hands, since they usually have fewer degrees of freedom. The method is data-driven; sequences of hands manipulating an object are captured semi-automatically with a structured-light setup. The training data is then combined with a new animation of the object in order to generate a plausible animation featuring the hand-object interaction.