Cross-Domain 3D Hand Pose Estimation with Dual Modalities

Recent advances in hand pose estimation have shed light on utilizing synthetic data to train neural networks, which however inevitably hinders generalization to real-world data due to domain gaps. To solve this problem, we present a framework for cross-domain semi-supervised hand pose estimation and target the challenging scenario of learning models from labelled multimodal synthetic data and unlabelled real-world data. To that end, we propose a dual-modality network that exploits synthetic RGB and synthetic depth images. For pre-training, our network uses multi-modal contrastive learning and attention-fused supervision to learn effective representations of the RGB images. We then integrate a novel self-distillation technique during fine-tuning to reduce pseudo-label noise. Experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves 3D hand pose estimation and 2D keypoint detection on benchmarks.